http://cabletv.com/national/726-anchorage-daily-news-drops-anchor.html

I am one of the owners of an independent ISP in Ohio. We have already been affected by the removal, in 2005, of net neutrality provisions from the telecommunications act. Big carriers have already blocked email traffic to our mail servers, and their tech support staff has told our customers that the “problem must be with their ISP” (not true). The actions of these carriers has created a tech support nightmare for us, and has already cost us customers. We’ve also been informed by the ILEC in our territory that they will not offer us the ability to resell Internet access services that our customers are craving, and for which there is a real demand (”unbundled loops” — broadband services that don’t require local dialtone, saving customers lots of money).

Our company pays over $10,000 each month for bandwidth to our upstream providers. We do more than $600,000 worth of business with AT&T every year, buying bandwidth, T-1s, and DSL circuits on behalf of our customers. It’s absolutely disingenuous for Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T, to claim that anyone is riding his network for free. If we should have been riding it for free, I want a refund for the last eleven years.

Without network neutrality, the companies that provide the real innovation on the edge will be unable to compete. This is *exactly* what the big carriers want — the U.S. government’s help in eliminating the competition by removing network neutrality protections that were put in place long ago, in exchange for the telecos’ free access to our public rights of way.

The carriers can’t have it both ways. Either they start paying appropriate rent for the rights of way, or they make their copper and fiber going through our public commons accessible to all at a competitive rate.

This statement by ‘handsoff’ is specifically written to be confusing to the average reader. For example, they present a host of contradictory statements all in one sentence by stating that “I and my coalition feel that legislating the internet is the worst possible solution. The notion that we will have to trust the likes of Senator Stevens who infamously shared his (lack of) understanding of the internet to control and regulate the internet…well frankly it’s frightening.”

They are right about the frightening nature of Senator Stevens’ legislative agenda and the extent of his ignorance regarding the very issues he wishes to assert his agenda over. Yet what they don’t tell you here is that they are the ones backing Senator Stevens and his legislation to change the rules of who controls the internet and allow for their very companies to monopolize control over content on it! Controlling and regulating the internet is exactly what these telcom corporations want to do, but they want to do it for themselves and for their own private profit. Sen. Stevens is their champion, and their referencing him in a negative light here is to make you the citizen think that they are proponants for the principles that the large majority of Americans support, that the internet to stay the way it is now.

“The internet works so well precisely because it is free.”

Exactly, and if duplicitously named groups like “Hands Off The Internet” get their way, it will no longer work that way. Though perhaps they do want “Hands Off The Internet,” as in ‘hands’ plural, for they’ll want it where there is only a single hand on the internet controlling the ease and availability of access to content, and that would be their monopolistic hand of their telcom corporation.

“Bucketing the web under the control of the Washington bureaucrats would doom the internet to slow-moving regulation, stalled innovation, and open the door to those in the government who would censor content.”

Again, this line is pure rhetorical hot air, meant to trigger response buttons in people to make them to feel one way about an issue, when the actual effect of the new legislation would have the very effect that they are afraid of. Its just that those who would be slowing the internet, stalling innovation and censoring content would be the private, unaccountable and uncontrollable corporations that would claim it for their own personal fiefdoms.

This BS is breathtakingly Orwellian in its scope. It conflates people’s interest in seeing the internet a free and open platform where all content is accessible equally with their efforts to actually change that very dynamic with new laws and policies that will transform it from a ‘pull’ platform to a ‘push’ platform, very much like the way cable tv works now. Websites that don’t pay ‘protection money’ to the phone companies that control the pipes will be marginlized to the slow ‘dirt roads’ of the internet, where companies that these telco corporations either own or have exclusive business contracts with will get favored treatement.

For the real deal on Net Neutrality and keeping the internet a free and open platform, please visit
http://www.savetheinternet.com
http://www.democraticmedia.org

The internet works so well precisely because it is free. Bucketing the web under the control of the Washington bureaucrats would doom the internet to slow-moving regulation, stalled innovation, and open the door to those in the government who would censor content.