Welcome To Crazy Town

How many of you use the internet? Now a days that may seem like a stupid question. We do everything online, from emailing a professor your late homework to buying groceries. Most colleges even prefer you to apply online, instead of printing out tons of paper and mailing it off to them. Ok so that’s how we use the internet here in the United States, but what about countries like China? Imagine yourself a student there and you wanted to do a report on western culture. So you go onto Google and you do a search. Chances are, little to no information will come up in the results. This is because the Chinese government blocks a lot of websites to prevent it’s citizens from obtaining much information about the world outside of the country. According to a recent study done by two students at Harvard Law School showed that out of 200,000 websites, about 20,000 were blocked. Most of these sites contained information about politics, news, entertainment, health, and commerce.1 The government wants to be selective about what it’s people can or cannot see. You’re probably thinking, well China is communist. That kind of stuff only happens in places like that. In actuality you’d be very very wrong. In fact, you yourself may not be seeing the full picture. In May of 2008 when the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5252, a telecommunications law that did not provide adequate protective measures net neutrality. I believe in net neutrality. What is net neutrality? Net neutrality is the belief that, “ Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet.”2
The culprits behind limiting what we can or can’t do online are the very ones providing us the service. Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, all these companies have been accused of and caught blocking the trafficking of certain digital media. An article by Adam Liptak of the New York Times, showed that Verizon had not allowed Naral Pro-Choice America a pro-choice group a five-digit “short code.” Such codes allow people interested in hearing from businesses, politicians and advocacy groups to sign up to receive text messages.3 In August of 2007, AT&T censored a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert because the lead singer criticized President Bush. In May 2008, both Comcast and Cox Communications were caught blocking users from connecting to bit-torrents such as LimeWire. People who shop online could be forced to only buy from an online market place that has ties to the ISP. For example, AT&T could slow down how fast you can access the iTunes store, even making it so slow that it doesn’t load. They could do that to all music services except one that they own. If you bank online, they could push you toward a bank they favor, and if you want to brush up on some politics they could choose to only display information of whichever candidate they approve of. As it stands now, the ones who provide gateways to the net have too much control over what gets accessed and what doesn’t. Net neutrality would prevent these companies from illegally filtering information. They would have to allow open access to all websites regardless of whether or not the company agrees with the site’s views.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg said, “We have to make sure they don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity. We need to pay for the pipe.”4 Seidenberg’s statement is echoed among the other internet service providers or ISPs. What may just seem like a slippery slope argument, could become reality. If net neutrality does not pass, ISP’s could start charging based on what websites you access, in a payment plan very similar to how you only pay for certain TV channels. If you wanted to use sites like Youtube or Google, you’d have to pay for access to those sites, and for the package that would let you load them. Many small businesses who use the internet to advertise and sell around the world would not be able to keep up with other businesses that can pay to have their site load faster and to have it pop up at the top of every search engine. Bloggers and social networking sites would die due to the cost of reporting news and uploading pictures and music. This would destroy sites like myspace, facebook, livejournal, and today. There would be little to no citizen journalists and people will be left with only the large corporate-owned media outlets like Fox news.
With the filtration of content, comes the infringement of Constitutional rights. The first amendment protects the right of free speech. That covers written and spoken word, but it does not necessarily digital expressions, this is the argument taken up by the Bell companies on the issue. However since the Constitution is an ever evolving document, it is implied that all form of speech are protected. By restricting what information people can find, and by silencing anything that opposes their agenda, the ISP’s are actually violating the 1st Amendment. By blocking those pro-choice text messages, Verizon effectively prevented widespread distribution of information that was not a threat to anyone. Yes, there are those who will say that abortion is murder and that is fine, but sending out information about abortion is not the same as shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. By only displaying certain political candidates, ISP’s could effectively control who runs, gets nominated, and elected to positions of power in government. I don’t know about you, but I would rather not have that decision made up for me.
Before my speech I bet none to very little of you knew about the net neutrality hearings going on in Congress right now. Or that our very own President Obama supports it and made it one of his issues during his campaign. We should not end up like China where what we can access and do is controlled by a small group of people.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, states, “The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true. Let us protect the neutrality of the net.”5 Please, don’t let choices be made for you. Support net neutrality and leave the control in your hands.