Internet

Draft Bill Would Eliminate Fair Use On The Internet

December 22, 2020 Shiva Stella, Public Knowledge. Educate! Congress, Copyright, Free Speech, Internet

Today, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) released a discussion draft of a bill that would “update” the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The language in this draft, if enacted, would radically overhaul the current copyright system for online content by centralizing unprecedented control of both content and digital platforms in the hands of the executive branch. The current draft text would significantly curtail online speech, subjecting every upload to mandatory content filtering while effectively eliminating fair use on the internet. The following can be attributed to Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:

New Effort To Give People More Control Over Online Privacy

October 7, 2020 DuckDuckGo, Spread Privacy. Create! Internet, Privacy, Surveillance

We believe online privacy should be simple and accessible to everyone, period. With the introduction of privacy regulations worldwide, consumers are gaining more rights to limit the sale and sharing of their personal data. While this is a great idea in theory, it doesn't amount to much if it is hard for consumers to take advantage of their rights. At present, consumers must invoke most all online privacy rights manually, website by website. That's why we're proud to be a founding member of a new effort to create a simple browser-oriented setting for users to more easily express their preference for privacy, called Global Privacy Control (GPC).

TikTok, Trump And The Need For A Digital Non-Aligned Movement

September 11, 2020 Juan Ortiz Freuler, InterPressNews. Create! Huawei, Internet, Non-Aligned Movement, Transparency

Recent weeks have seen a dramatic escalation in the U.S.’ stance towards tech companies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). After hounding the telecommunications company Huawei for years, the social networking app TikTok is the latest Chinese company to enter the firing line. On 5 August U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo published a press release that could be seen as the master plan that explained the logic behind these policies: creating a parallel internet, defined as a place where companies from the PRC have no place.

How Big Telecom Smothers City-Run Broadband

July 21, 2020 Allan Holmes, The Center for Public Integrity. Strategize! Corporatism, Internet, Municipal Networks, Telecom

Janice Bowling, a 67-year-old grandmother and Republican state senator from rural Tennessee, thought it only made sense that the city of Tullahoma be able to offer its local high-speed Internet service to areas beyond the city limits. After all, many of her rural constituents had slow service or did not have access to commercial providers, like AT&T Inc. and Charter Communications Inc. But a 1999 Tennessee law prohibits cities that operate their own Internet networks from providing access outside the boundaries where they provide electrical service. Bowling wanted to change that and introduced a bill in February to allow them to expand. She viewed the network, which offers speeds about 80 times faster than AT&T and 10 times faster than Charter in Tullahoma according to advertised services, as a utility, like electricity, that all Tennesseans need.

Co-op Has A Plan To Democratise Large Parts Of The Internet

May 27, 2020 By Leo Sammallahti, Co-op Exchange. Create! Democratize, Internet, New Economy, Privatization

Around 5% of all websites use the .org domain, with the most popular being Wikipedia. These websites represent around 6% of the top 1000 websites and 7% of the top 100 000 domains. The domain itself has been controlled by ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which is part of the non-profit Internet Society. In 2019 a private equity firm, Ethos capital, approached ICANN with an offer of buying the .org registrar for $1.6 billion. As the deal seemed likely to pass, the opposition to the deal mobilised a massive campaign to stop it. ICANN received 3,252 comments, with only 6 in favour of the deal. Perhaps the most commonly cited criticism included the removal of the price cap. The price for .org domains had been capped at 9.93$/year since 2013, although registrants were allowed to freely sell them.

How Artists Are Exploring Radical Economies

March 26, 2020 Robert Kauffman, Resilience.org. Create! Art, Decentralization, Internet, New Economy

There are many proposals for radical economies from progressive economists, activists and think tanks. Artists are increasingly joining these debates with speculative proposals and unconventional methodologies. I will explore three art projects here that approach the economies of caring labor, agricultural and social production on farms, and forests, with an artistic spin. Driven by artistic curiosity but not shying away from addressing systemic issues, these projects help us open the scope of our discussions by engaging with diverse social actors. The ReUnion network is a design prototype for a socio-economic ecosystem that helps people organize bottom-up social support through long-term P2P (peer to peer) care agreements.

Corona Virus And The Digital Divide

March 15, 2020 Janine Jackson, FAIR. Educate! Coronavirus, COVID-19, Education, FCC, Internet, Media Justice

It is not lost on some that, all of a sudden, paid sick leave is obviously socially important; understaffed hospitals are an outrage; and, really, shouldn’t the government be paying for this…? I mean, it’s community health we’re talking about! And all it took was a little pandemic—an outbreak that, as it just happens, doesn’t confine itself to low-income or non-white people. The New York Times‘ Farhad Manjoo (3/11/20) tried wistfully to imagine US companies and politicians taking seriously the coronavirus lesson of the need for a real social safety net and worker protections. Journalists could also themselves keep focus on enduring fissures that a public health crisis throws into relief. For example, as more schools move classes online, we could talk about the minimally 12 million, disproportionately African-American and Latinx students who don’t have internet access at home.

Stop .org Domain Registry Sale To Private Equity Firm

February 4, 2020 Staff, Electronic Frontier Foundation Resist! Censorship, Internet

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said a private equity firm newly created by domain name industry insiders should be stopped from acquiring the .org domain registry, which provides a home on the Internet to thousands of public interest nonprofits organizations. EFF this week called on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to halt a transaction that puts nonprofit organizations at risk of censorship and financial exploitation. EFF also provided to ICANN a petition signed by over 500 nonprofit groups from around the world, plus thousands of Internet users, all voicing opposition to the $1.1 billion sale.

Dodging Bullets On The Path To A Decentralized Future: 2019 In Review

December 26, 2019 By Danny O'Brien, Eff.org Create! Decentralization, Internet

The Internet’s decentralized nature has historically been its greatest super-power, granting it the ability to shrug off censors and spies and redistribute power away from corruptible gatekeepers out to the creators and innovators on its edges. But it’s only been in the last few years that the Net's own corporate children—Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the rest—have started to defeat that innate ability to re-route around such choke-holds.

Co-ops: By The Community, For The Community

December 26, 2019 Chad Rupe, Usda.gov Create! Cooperatives, Internet, Technology

At home, her family in Barnes County, N.D., often relied on a cell phone hotspot. However, their ability to access information was frequently constrained by their phone plan’s data limits. Tina routinely had to drive to the next town to access the internet, or she had to rely upon whatever books happened to be available for the four children that she home schools. This travel took a toll on her family, and Tina worried that her autistic son was not getting the quality of the education he needs. Fortunately, these challenges have since come to an end.

With Net Neutrality Axed, Local Governments Are Racing To Save The Open Internet

November 26, 2019 By Victor Pickard and David Elliot Berman, Inthesetimes.com Create! Courts, FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon are free to slow down, block or prioritize internet traffic as they wish, without interference by the federal government. That’s the effect of an October ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding a 2017 ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that reversed rules requiring what is called “net neutrality” – treating all internet traffic equally, regardless of where it’s from or what kind of data it is. Giving corporate telecom giants this power is wildly unpopular among the American people, who know that these companies have overcharged customers and interfered with users’ internet access in the past.

Why Fiber Is Vastly Superior To Cable And 5G

October 21, 2019 By Bennett Cyphers and Ernesto Falcon, Eff.org Create! Infrastructure, Internet, New Economy, Telecommunications

The United States, its states, and its local governments are in dire need of universal fiber plans. Major telecom carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have discontinued their fiber-to-the-home efforts, leaving most people facing expensive cable monopolies for the future. While much of the Internet infrastructure has already transitioned to fiber, a supermajority of households and businesses across the country still have slow and outdated connections. Transitioning the “last mile” into fiber will require a massive effort from industry and government—an effort the rest of the world has already started.

Court Decision On Net Neutrality Opens Doors To Next Steps

October 8, 2019 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast FCC, Internet, Media, Net Neutrality

In 2015, under great pressure from a broad media justice movement, the FCC passed Net Neutrality policies that guaranteed the universal right to go where users want to go on the Internet. In 2017, the Trump FCC under Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai moved quickly to repeal Net Neutrality. The movement responded with several tactics to win Net Neutrality back. One of those was a challenge in court, Mozilla v FCC. Last week, the court finally announced its decision. We speak with Craig Aaron of Free Press about that decision. While the court did not restore Net Neutrality, it did open the doors for the movement to use other tactics to achieve a free Internet. Aaron describes what those are and the bigger picture of an Internet for everyone.

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