Telecommunications industry working overtime to misrepresent net neutrality

I don’t believe that money is speech, but I’ve repeatedly seen that money motivates dishonest speech, much of it uttered by paid “experts.” This money-motivated dishonesty is a recurring problem regarding many issues, including the topic of this article, net neutrality. On August 8, 2011, I was pleased to see that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published my letter to the editor on the topic of net neutrality.  Here’s the full text of my letter:

Maintain neutrality We pay Internet service providers to move data from point to point. We don't pay them to steer us to selected sites (by speeding up access times) or to discourage us from using other sites (by slowing down or blocking access). Nor do we pay them to decide what applications we can use over the Internet. I should be free to use Skype even if it competes with the phone company's own telephone service. Giving Internet users this unimpeded choice of content and applications is the essence of "net neutrality," and it has inspired unceasing innovation over the Internet. The Senate soon may vote on a "resolution of disapproval" that would strip the Federal Communications Commission of its authority to protect Americans from potential abuses. If it passes, net neutrality would be at serious risk. Congress is under big pressure (and receiving big money) from companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, who want to become the gatekeepers of the Internet. They would like to carve up the Internet so that it would become like cable TV, with tiered plans and limited menus of content that they would dictate. Phone companies should not be allowed to dictate how we use the Internet. I urge Sens. Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt to support net neutrality by voting against the resolution of disapproval. Erich Vieth • St. Louis
I wrote this letter as a concerned citizen.  I have long been concerned about net neutrality.  I have seen ample evidence that increasingly monopolistic telecommunications companies have no qualms about forcibly assuming the role of Internet gate-keeper.  As for-profit entities, their instinct is to limit our Internet choices if it would make them ever greater piles of money. Call me a pragmatist based on America’s television experience; telecommunications companies want to control how we use the Internet much like cable TV companies shove users into programming packages in order to maximize profit. On August 18, 2011, I noticed that the Post-Dispatch published an anti-net-neutrality letter. Here is the text of that letter: [More . . . ]

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Accidentally disclosed AT&T memo reveals true reason for proposed merger with T-Mobile

See this analysis regarding an AT&T memo that shoots down AT&T publicly stated reasons for the merger it proposes with T-Mobile. Free Press has distributed a mass emailing that summarizes the true reasons for the proposed merger:

AT&T’s plan to take over T-Mobile is about gouging consumers, destroying a competitor and firing an estimated 20,000 American workers.
More here from Free Press, as reported by Planet Unfiltered:
“We now know the truth: AT&T is willing to pay a $39 billion premium for one reason and one reason only — to kill off the competition,” Free Press CEO [Craig Aaron] said in a statement. “It would cost AT&T one-tenth of the merger’s cost to expand its network than to buy up T-Mobile. Yet AT&T is willing to pay a 900-percent markup to take out a lower-priced competitor and make sure it can lock in and gouge consumers in the future. The only thing stopping AT&T from expanding its network is greed. One plus one does not equal three, but subtracting one competitor adds up to billions in profits for AT&T and thousands of Americans out of work.”

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A Subtle Change to the Way the Web Works

A recent article on ZDNet, 10 things you should know about HTML5, brought to mind the good old days. I wrote my first web site in early 1995, back before there was a World Wide Web Consortium, before there were hundreds of thousands of web sites, before Internet Explorer was even a gleam in Bill Gates' eye, and HTML 1.0 had recently been ratified. I had to manually install a TCP/IP stack in DOS (underlying Windows 3.11), and bought a book on the proposed HTML 2.0 standard to use with my purchased 3½" disc of the new Netscape 2.0. Yes, I wrote my first several sites using Notepad, before moving up to the superior Notepad++. Netscape had some good debugging tools built in that IE never felt the need to mimic. The first deficiency that I noticed in the HTML standard was that there was no graphical mode. They had no way to draw a box, a line, a circle, or any graphical image except for the img tag to import Microsoft BMP and CompuServe GIF files. The open JPG standard was just coming out. I couldn't believe it. The HPGL vector language seemed pretty standard to me back then, and has since become the universal vector drawing protocol in plotters and such. But somehow the designers of the new, image-based World Wide Web addition to the Internet had no apparent plan to explicitly support graphics. Sure, one could buy Flash and embed it as an object on a page. But it was expensive, clumsy, and not widely deployed back in the 300/1200/2400 baud world. But now, only sixteen years later the W3C is finally putting together the new HTML 5.0 standard, including both vector and video graphics as part of the basic language! Because of the now-entrenched nature of Flash, that isn't going away quickly. After all, many web sites still use the CompuServe GIF 1989a (formerly proprietary) image format. But Flash or DivX or QuickTime will no longer be necessary to build fully graphical web pages.

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Bank of America forbids withdrawal-of-money protest

On Friday, August 12, 2011, about 50 members of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment ("MORE") protested the activities of Bank of America at the downtown branch of the bank in St. Louis , Missouri. Many of the protesters have been longtime customers of Bank of America, and they intended…

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Rupert Murdoch’s corrupt tactics in the United States

Rolling Stone offers a well-written expose of the corrupt actions of News Corp here in America:

[A]n examination of Murdoch's corporate history reveals that each of the elements of the scandal in London – hacking, thuggish reporting tactics, unethical entanglements with police, hush-money settlements and efforts to corrupt officials at the highest levels of government – extend far beyond Fleet Street. Over the past decade, News Corp. has systematically employed such tactics in its U.S. operations, exhibiting what a recent lawsuit filed against the firm calls a "culture run amok." As a former high-ranking News Corp. executive tells Rolling Stone: "It's the same shit, different day."

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