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The GOP's Secret Plan to Kill the Internet
Matt Stoller discovered the GOP's secret plan in the Austin American Statesman:
The House and Senate are preparing to vote on telecommunications legislation that could affect every American who surfs the Internet, watches cable TV or uses a phone.
But no one should waste much time watching the floor debates on C-SPAN. The lawmakers admit their goal is not to pass definitive legislation in public in the coming weeks.
Instead, they want to pass separate bills, regardless of how different they may be. The final version would be negotiated, largely in private, by about a dozen senators and representatives on a conference committee.
The Senate just needs to pass "anything to get us into conference," where the real decisions will be made, House telecommunications subcommittee chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said Tuesday at a telecom forum hosted by National Journal's Technology Daily.
As Matt notes:
The conference committee is where House and Senate bills are reconciled, and differences are ironed out. What Upton is saying is that this process will be abused for the benefit of telecom interests. Usually lawmakers keep that kind of stuff secret. Pretty brazen, I have to say.
So what are we going to do about it? Visit SaveTheInternet.com
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Net Neutrality
The Republican bills would allow the cable and telephone companies to turn the Internet into the MSM. The bills would allow the companies to set fees for greater accessibility to a website. In other words, the corporations could price out other websites by paying for preferential treatment. This would be another revenue stream for the telecommunication companies so they are going to lobby hard to eliminate the net neutrality we now enjoy. It would give them control of the internet which would eliminate the competition the internet has posed to their other media holdings.
Yes, Tecumsah, you are 100% correct.
But not only could they decide which commercial sites you get to visit, they also could control whose private website could or could not be accessed. I can almost guarantee you that GOP friendly and GOP approved websites would load as usual, but try to access a progressive website, and it will take forever to load, if it ever loads. Also, try to post a progressive website. Be prepared to pay an arm and a leg and jump through hoops of impossiblities.
Also at risk is where you could have your email account, and whether or not it was going to be or exorbitant in price.
In fact, just accessing the web could become considerably more complex whenever it suited the communications companies.
Bear in mind, people in China, North Korea, Tibet, and other dictatorships around the world are now able to access the Web through clandestine methods and keep in touch with the rest of the world. There's considerably more at stake here than what meets the eye.
Contrary to some people's belief, this is a vital issue that does not affect only a few techies here and there, but rather a communication network around the world.
No one should let themselves be convinced that this is not an important issue!
Terry