Kemstone's Journal

The latest developments in the battle over net neutrality do not look good at all. Tim Karr wrote a piece this week for the Huffington Post drawing attention to the fact that the FCC is now holding closed-door meetings with industry to make a deal.

The meetings include a small group of industry lobbyists representing the likes of AT&T, Verizon, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and Google. They reportedly met for two-and-a-half hours on Monday morning and will convene another meeting today. The goal according to insiders is to “reach consensus” on rules of the road for the Internet.

Karr points out that all of these groups have a financial interest in controlling information. They’ll want to be able to control which websites are able to load quickly and which would crawl along so slowly that nobody would have the patience to visit them. As of now, all websites are equal, and my crappy little blog loads just as fast the New York Times (faster, actually, because I have no ads).

Missing from these negotiations are the actual citizens of the United States, who might not want to give AT&T control over which websites are the easiest to access. In fact, over a six-month period in which ordinary people were invited to comment on the issue, 85% of all comments strongly favoured maintaining net neutrality.

And you’d think with such enormously high public support we’d be able to win on this issue, especially with a president who pledged his strong support:

But it’s looking more and more like the big corporations are going to get their way on this one too. It may seem like small potatoes, but this issue is actually far more significant than you might realize.

Just look at the kind of information you get from TV news as opposed to news online. Because TV airwaves are controlled by large corporations, you seldom hear any warnings about corporate consolidation of power. But on the internet, which is now controlled strictly by its users, the facts about corporate power-grabbing are still readily available and accessible.

But if we hand over that control, online news and blogs will gradually sink to the level of TV news and commentary, and before you know it there won’t be any more talk of the power elites controlling everything because by then they will control everything. And we know what happens when you give corporations unfettered control over everything. War, poverty, financial crises, the elimination of the middle-class, and short-sighted environmental rape for the sake of profit.

The internet, as I’ve written many times, is the last best hope for humanity. If we’re going to come together and forge a new path towards a peaceful, sustainable existence in this world, that conversation will have to be done through the internet. And if we hand control of the internet over to the corporations, they’ll make sure that conversation never takes place. Net Neutrality may seem like a small issue, but the fate of humanity hangs in the balance.

If Obama breaks his pledge and lets the corporations have their way on this one, he is dead to me. I’m still pissed off at him for letting them have their way with health care and financial reform, but this is the last straw. If he folds on this one, he deserves to be a one-term president no matter who runs against him. At that point it won’t matter anyway, because all hope will be lost.