Internet

Free Press: Today’s FCC Ruling Will Not Stand

December 15, 2017 Timothy Karr, freepress.net Resist! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

WASHINGTON — On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines to approve the deceptively named “Restoring Internet Freedom Order.” The order dismantles the agency’s 2015 Net Neutrality rules, abdicating FCC authority over internet service providers and clearing the way for blocking, throttling and discrimination by the nation’s largest phone and cable companies. Free Press will take the FCC to court to challenge its reversal on the proper definition of broadband, the accuracy of its contentious justifications for tossing out the rules, and the many process fouls that have plagued the FCC proceeding since it began earlier this year.

Head Of FCC Mocks Impending Destruction Of Internet

December 15, 2017 Staff, leecamp.com Educate! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

Last week, the FCC held its annual “Telecom Prom”- an affair filled with industry executives and employees. The event has a strict no camera policy, but thanks to an anonymous spy, we have a small window into the mentality of our ruling class, to whom public outcry is nothing more than a giant joke. Let’s break down the most horrifying moments of Mr. Pai’s 28-minute speech: 00:20 – Pai jokes that in preparation for this event, he crowd-sourced the joke writing process and received 22 million jokes, 7 million of which were fake submissions by bots. Here Pai is alluding to the enormous number of fake comments submitted to the FCC to drown out the public’s cry in support of continuing net neutrality.

Microbusinesses: Real Victims Of Net Neutrality Vote

December 14, 2017 Josh Silverman, work.qz.com Educate! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

Imagine trying to buy your mom the perfect holiday gift from her favorite small designer’s website, only to find that you’re browsing at dial-up speeds and the images won’t load. Chances are, you won’t stick around to make a purchase and that small business will lose a critical sale. Now, multiply that experience by the 1.9 million Etsy sellers and 29.6 million small businesses who depend on the open internet to compete with much larger, more established brands. Nine out of ten of our sellers are women, and most are running businesses out of their homes, many of them in rural communities. These are the people who stand to lose the most when the FCC votes to overturn net neutrality protections this week. Under the FCC’s new proposal, businesses that can’t pay off big cable companies could find themselves in the internet slow lane or blocked altogether.

Protests Intensify Before FCC Net Neutrality Vote

December 14, 2017 John Zangas, dcmediagroup.us Resist! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality, Protests

Washington, DC — Over 200 Net Neutrality supporters braved bitter cold at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Wednesday to make sure Commissioners know they won’t stand by quietly if it cedes control of the Internet to a handful of telecoms. The rally came a day before a critical vote on a proposed rollback of regulations governing broadband providers. On the sidewalk outside FCC headquarters, protesters built a “memorial” to the Internet with a bed of flowers, candles and a wreath and chanted slogans. FCC staff took pictures of the memorial as they passed by and watched from windows above. Among protesters’ concerns is the possibility that five corporations may end up with the “keys” to the Internet and be able to decide what data flows through the U.S. communications network, who has access to it and how fast it can be downloaded.

FCC Does Not Understand Internet, Flawed Analysis

December 13, 2017 Jon Brodkin, arstechnica.com Educate! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal "is based on a flawed and factually inaccurate understanding of Internet technology," a group of inventors and technologists told members of Congress and the FCC in a letter today. The letter's 21 signers include Internet Protocol co-inventor Vint Cerf; World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, public-key cryptography inventors Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman; RSA public-key encryption algorithm co-inventor Ronald Rivest; Paul Vixie, who designed several widely used Domain Name System (DNS) protocol extensions and applications; and security expert and professor Susan Landau, who has fought against government attempts to make phone encryption less secure.

Boulder Takes Closer Look At City-Owned Broadband

December 12, 2017 Alex Burness, dailycamera.com Create! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality, Utilities

It's going to cost somewhere between $70 and $140 million, officials estimate, to build out the underground fiber-to-the-premises network that Boulder needs to make community-wide broadband a reality. The question for the City Council has never been whether this pursuit is worthwhile, as voters and elected leaders clearly agree on the value of open-access, affordable, high-speed internet — the introduction of which would put pressure on the incumbent Comcast-CenturyLink duopoly to lower their prices and offer higher speeds. Rather, the question is: Who is going to pay for this build-out? And, for much of the past year, based on advice of a consultant Boulder has paid $186,000 to date, the most likely answer seemed to be that the city would partner with an outside provider willing to pay for the build-out. But now, Boulder is taking its closest look to date at another path, in which the city finances the build and owns the network. "We've heard from people saying, hey, what would it look like for the city to do it alone?" said Chris Meschuk, assistant city manager. "We had not done a ton of analysis of that option, so right now we have a consultant doing that." Meschuk has assumed the responsibility on the project once held by Don Ingle, the information technology director who is no longer with the city.

Future If Net Neutrality Is Repealed

December 12, 2017 David Gorodyansky, techcrunch.com Educate! FCC, Freedom of Press, Internet, Media, Net Neutrality

If you’re scared of a future America without net neutrality, I want to terrify you. The potential repeal of what should be a civic right should chill you to the bone. No, there is more than one future you should fear, and it isn’t just one that involves the (falsely reported) Portuguese internet where we pay $4.99 for access to streaming video. Don’t get me wrong – it’s totally possible, and not remotely the worst thing that could happen. After spending twelve years running a company that helps millions of people to break through the barriers of censorship imposed by oppressive governments, I am quite familiar with the ramifications of such repressions. When a country lacks an open internet, the government (and companies friendly with said government) are able to do anything from simply blocking or banning apps entirely (EG: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, WhatsApp for censorship or economic reasons) to more aggressive moves such as Egypt’s effective shutdown of their internet service providers. As a lucky American, it’s easy to say “this can’t happen here,” which is a reasonable, human gesture — we live under a democracy, but said democracy also has polarized politics and a totally different lobbying system to the rest of the world.

Google Hiring 10,000 Reviewers To Censor YouTube Content

December 12, 2017 Zaida Green, wsws.org Educate! Censorship, Google, Internet

Google is escalating its campaign of internet censorship, announcing that it will expand its workforce of human censors to over 10,000, the internet giant announced on December 4. The censors’ primary focus will be videos and other content on YouTube, its video-sharing platform, but will work across Google to censor content and train its automated systems, which remove videos at a rate four times faster than its human employees. Human censors have already reviewed over 2 million videos since June. YouTube has already removed over 150,000 videos, 50 percent of which were removed within two hours of upload. The company is working to accelerate the rate of takedown through machine-learning from manual censorship, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in an official blog post. The hiring drive by Google is yet another advance in the campaign against any expression of political opposition. Other social media giants have implemented measures against “fake news”; Facebook has altered its algorithms to reduce the visibility of certain news stories, and Twitter has banned the Russian-funded media outlets RT and Sputnik from advertising on the platform. While railing against “extremist content,” “child exploitation” and “hoaxes” in the interest of “public safety,” the ultimate goal of this campaign is the suppression of left-wing, anti-war sentiment.

Massive Effort To ‘Break The Internet,’ Beseige FCC Before Net Neutrality Vote

December 12, 2017 John Zangas, dcmediagroup.us Resist! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

Washington, DC — Groups against a two-tiered Internet are rallying to beat back FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai’s plan to end Net Neutrality, which will affect users’ ability to access thousands of websites. They are mobilizing with support from activists for a two-day “Break The Internet” effort to temporarily shut down websites and flood Congress with phone calls and messages. They hope to convince Congress not to allow the FCC to vote for the internet to be handed over to a handful of telecoms. Up until this time, the Internet–the modern backbone of nearly all U.S. communications–has been free and open to anyone with a connection. This principle of open and free communications access has been guided by Title II of the Telecommunications Act of 1934. But the FCC plans to vote on Thursday, December 14, to remove the language from the rule which would in effect deregulate it and allow some Internet Service Providers to take full control of access to it. Activists say this will have a chilling affect on business websites that rely on the Internet for their transactions because it will force them to go through the big telecoms. Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile and Sprint would be able to create access criteria that charge different prices for faster service, limit access to sites that compete with their services or throttle data to any website at their discretion.

Organizations Call On FCC To Abandon Attack On Net Neutrality

December 11, 2017 Timothy Karr, freepress.net Resist! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

WASHINGTON — On Thursday, more than 30 press freedom, civil liberties and open government groups submitted a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai urging him to cancel the scheduled Dec. 14 vote to undermine the open-internet protections put in place in 2015. “You must not abandon Net Neutrality,” the letter to Pai reads. “The open internet is today our main conduit for expression and information. It is our library, our printing press, our delivery truck and our town square. Journalists, academics, governments and local communities depend on it to connect, communicate and collaborate every day. And as old models for news and information evolve or decline, the internet presents opportunities for new and independent media outlets to emerge.” The letter was signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, the Center for Media Justice, Civic Hall, Color Of Change, Defending Rights and Dissent, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, Free Press, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Globalvision, Inc., Local Independent Online News Publishers, Media Alliance...

The FCC’s Net Neutrality Plan Breaks 50 Years Of History

December 8, 2017 Tim Wu, wired.com Educate! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

By Tim Wu for Wired - What’s now called the “net neutrality debate” is really a restatement of a classic question: How should a network’s owner treat the traffic that it carries? What rights, if any, should a network’s users have versus its owners? The question is ancient enough to be relevant to medieval bridges, railroad networks, and other “common carriers.” But let’s skip 500 years or so and keep the focus on telecommunications networks, where what we now call net neutrality policy really has two ancestors, both dating from the 1970s. Those ancestors can be understood as reactions to the great AT&T monopoly, its ideology, and its comprehensive control over communications networks. In the late 1960s, (in a sign of how the politics have changed), the Nixon administration’s FCC sought to increase the prospects for competitors in telephone markets. At that point AT&T had been the nation’s communications monopolist for many decades, and as a matter of ideology the firm believed in “one system”—namely, that it, and it alone, should control everything on or attached to the network. The FCC became interested in a new group of businesses that ran “over the top” of AT&T’s nationwide network. These were at the time newly formed companies, now lost to history, with names like Tymshare, National CSS, CompuServe, and Dial Data, which offered computer services “over” the network to businesses. These were the first ancestors of today’s “over-the-top” operations like Netflix, Wikipedia, Google, and so on.

Telecom Prom Protest

December 8, 2017 Staff, artkillingapathy.com Resist! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality, Protests

By Staff of Art Killing Apathy - Today across the country people showed up at Verizon stores to protest the selling off of our open internet to big Telecoms. Several protests included marches to Congressional offices to demand that Congress stop the FCC vote happening next Thursday, December 14th. The day of action, organized by a Team Internet coalition, highlighted the fact that the FCC is in fact a corporately owned entity. FCC chairman Ajit Pai is a former Verizon lawyer and thanks to the revolving door is now using his chairmanship at the FCC to hand our free speech over to be hacked up into toll roads and slow lanes – all in the name of corporate profit. Here in Washington, DC there was a special dinner held at the Hilton for Telecom CEOs, lobbyists and you guessed it, FCC chairman Ajit Pai. A few days ago he gave a speech at a Verizon event. His brash disregard for the wishes of the people has been and continues to be remarkable. And we wanted to make sure his corporate cronies heard and saw our feelings on the matter, not to mention passersby in rush hour traffic. Roughly 60 people stood outside the Hilton with signs and posters while a giant projection lit up a hotel wall across busy Connecticut Avenue. Organizers led the group in chants and asked people to come up and share their reasons for being at the event.

It May Be The Final Days Of Free & Open Internet

December 6, 2017 Staff, youtube.com Resist! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality

By Staff of Redacted Tonight - On December 14th, the FCC is voting to gut net neutrality. While internet providers like Verizon will definitely abuse their monopoly-like power with net neutrality protections, undoing Obama era net neutrality rules will escalate corporate control of mass media in the US and must be avoided. Net neutrality can only truly be protected by a revolution in who owns the networks. We need to end our dependence on telecom monopolies and build locally-owned internet infrastructure. Redacted Tonight Correspondent John F. O’Donnell joins host Lee Camp at the desk to not only remind us about the need for municipal broadband, but to let everyone know that there are still a number of actions happening across the country where we can push back and demand a free and open internet

Local Governments Ask FCC To Delay Net Neutrality Vote

December 6, 2017 Jay Cassano, ibtimes.com Resist! FCC, Internet, Local Government, Net Neutrality

By Jay Cassano for IB Times - When the Federal Communications Commission votes December 14 on Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to repeal “net neutrality,” the Obama-era rules that classified broadband providers as “common carriers,” regulation of the internet will likely be ceded to the Federal Trade Commission. With the vote approaching, a coalition of local governments and consumer protections groups sent a letter to the FCC Monday morning asking the commission to delay the vote until a crucial, obscure court case is resolved. Leading those governments is New York City, alongside a host of high profile consumer rights advocates. At issue is the case FTC vs AT&T Mobility , which could undermine the FTC’s regulatory authority. AT&T's unorthodox argument: that because part of its business is already regulated by the FCC as a common carrier, the FTC does not have jurisdiction because of what is known as the “common carrier exception.” That exception is normally read to apply to specific activities of businesses and not the entire business itself. Nonetheless, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit originally sided with AT&T. The decision was later vacated and is now being reviewed en banc by the entire court.

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