Title: Socialist Architect Behind FCC’s Net Neutrality: Let’s Eliminate “Capitalist Propaganda” Source:
Infowars URL Source:http://www.infowars.com/socialist-a ... iminate-capitalist-propaganda/ Published:Feb 26, 2015 Author:Kit Daniels Post Date:2015-02-26 09:05:13 by Deckard Keywords:None Views:552 Comments:1
The FCC’s proposed “Net Neutrality” regulations grew out of the work of a socialist professor who wants to take control of the Internet out of private hands by declaring it a “public utility.”
“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies, but the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009.
“What we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility. We want an Internet where you don’t have to have a password and that you don’t pay a penny to use. It is your right to use the Internet.”
(Media Capitalism, the State and 21st Century Media Democracy Struggles: An Interview with Robert McChesney – The Bullet Socialist Project, August 9, 2009)
“Advertising is the voice of capital. We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it. The fight against hyper-commercialism becomes especially pronounced in the era of digital communications.”
(Media Capitalism, the State, and 21st Century Media Democracy Struggles: An Interview with Robert McChesney – The Bullet Socialist Project, September 8, 2009)
“Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism. It is impossible to conceive of a better world with a media system that remains under the thumb of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, under the thumb of the owning class.”
(Journalism, Democracy, … and Class Struggle – Monthly Review, November 2000)
“There is no real answer (to the U.S. economic crisis) but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”
(A New New Deal under Obama? (with John Bellamy Foster) – Monthly Review, December 21, 2008)
“Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism.”
(The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers – Nation, March 18, 2009)
McChesney’s managing director at Free Press, Craig Aaron, had this to say:
“We need a law that says, no matter what kind of network you’re on—wired, wireless, I forget, there’s some other network coming in the future—that net neutrality applies.”
(Interview with Robert McChesney – Media Matters Public Radio show, March 22, 2009)
And McChesney’s former policy director at Free Press, Ben Scott, also said:
“Increasingly the Internet is no longer a commercial service, it’s an infrastructure…What we’re witnessing at the FCC now is the logical next step which is we are going to create a regulatory framework for the Internet which recognizes it is an infrastructure now and not a commercial service.”
(C-SPAN: The Communicators – C-Span, September 25, 2009)
Free Press has welded extraordinary influence over the Obama administration for the past several years.
“[Former FCC Chairman Julius] Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “The FCC’s [former] chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.”
Lloyd’s report, entitled The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio, advocated draconian measures to limit free speech on AM and FM stations under the guise of “balanced radio programming,” i.e. a fairness doctrine.
“While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, conservative talk continues to be pushed out over the airwaves in greater multiples of hours than progressive talk is broadcast,” the report stated, oversimplifying politics into a false left/right paradigm. “These empirical findings may not be surprising given general impressions about the format, but they are stark and raise serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.”
The FCC wants to similarly restrict political free speech on the Internet.
I couldn’t have created Tumblr without net neutrality.
By DAVID KARP February 26, 2015
Tumblr, like a lot of things on the internet, began as a side project. I wanted a way to blog that didn’t exist yet. It was easy enough to put the first version together, and it seemed fun to put it out there for others to use. By happy coincidence, it was something a lot of other people were looking for, too. Today, millions of them are using it in ways I could never have imagined.
People use Tumblr to write, to draw comics, to share GIFs, to crush on unconventionally attractive celebrities, to celebrate cultural detritus in both ironic and unironic ways, to share and debate their political beliefs, to explore their identities, and to find communities of all kinds that I never knew existed. I may have launched Tumblr, but our users have carried it to where it is today.
The whole Internet works like this. There’s no singular vision that holds it together, and anyone can take it in whatever direction they want to. Anyone can make a blog on Tumblr, put out a video on Vimeo, sell crafts on Etsy, Kickstart their dream project, build an app—anything that will fit through a fiber cable.
Using the Internet, people can turn hobbies into jobs, and passion into revenue. They can do so with little risk, and they can be sure that anyone who’s interested in what they’re doing has access to it. That’s what the companies that carry Internet traffic are there for.
And that’s the promise of net neutrality. No matter how big or small anyone’s ambitions, and no matter what their resources, everyone’s work gets handled the same way, and gets the same opportunity to succeed.
Over the past year, there’s been a real threat to that promise. The Internet providers saw an opportunity to pick winners and losers, rather than let the internet continue to sort those things out for itself. How would they pick? In lots of ways. For example, by charging companies for the ability to prioritize their traffic over everyone else’s. Content from companies that didn’t pay would be slowed down—or potentially never transmitted at all.
This scheme would congeal the Internet into something stagnant, something where new players wouldn’t be able to join the game without having the funds to do so. I’m proud to have been able to turn a little side project into an engine of creativity for so many people. I don’t want to be among the last people able to do that. We need more Etsys, more Kickstarters, more Tumblrs, more little ideas that turn into life-changing enterprises. Ending net neutrality would kill those ideas before they’ve even seen the light of day. It would make the Internet work a lot more like cable TV, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of innovation.
This is why we a lot of companies—including ourselves—have been working to convince the FCC to adopt bright-line rules that firmly establish net neutrality as a guiding principle of Internet communication. This would need to begin with the reclassification of Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Some people suggest that doing so would put onerous regulation on Internet traffic. Not so, say the experts—it’s simply a guarantee that Internet traffic is safe from discriminatory practices, and ensures that carriers move all traffic freely, fairly and equally. Think of it as a Bill of Rights for anyone who uses the Internet.
Through a variety of efforts, we at Tumblr, along with other dedicated supporters of the cause, have driven over 435,000 calls to Congress urging them to support the FCC in doing the right thing, and the FCC has received over 4 million comments in total. It’s crucial that every generation has the same opportunities that we’ve had, and we’re proud that our users have joined us so enthusiastically in this mission.
And, yes, the specifics of this are incredibly important. As people have made their voices heard and lawmakers have caught on to the fact that
So we are unbelievably excited about FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s decision to look past the fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by carrier lobbyists in D.C. and, instead, listen to the millions upon millions of people who have personally shaped the internet through their blogs, their code, their art, their businesses, their dreams. It’s a brave political step—and a sensible one. While we remain cautious about the finer details of the rules, what we’ve heard about the plan, particularly the FCC’s use of strong and precise authority for the rules, is hugely promising.
The FCC is set to vote on the proposed rules on February 26. We’ll continue to do whatever we can to support Wheeler’s decision. We’ll also keep fighting for Internet freedom wherever it’s threatened, and we’re sure our users will do the same. It’s from their ranks that the next wave of innovations will come, and those innovations—ones we can’t wait to see—can only flourish on a free, fair and open Internet.
