From the folks at Free Press via internetnews.com…

The Internet is changing our country by changing how we interact with our media and government, said speakers here at the Freedom To Connect conference on Tuesday.

“We’re talking about more than technology and politics here,” said Timothy Karr, campaign director for Free Press. “We’re talking about a movement.”

Karr defined three movements that are working together: the movements for media reform, free culture and open government. Each has coalesced around a specific crisis and has survived to influence future policy decisions.

Karr said that the media reform movement was forged in the public battles over spectrum and then over battles on public access to private cable networks. The free culture movement is growing out of copyright battles in social media such as Facebook and YouTube.

It will become a truly full-fledged “movement” when it moves beyond organizing for the “freedom to connect” to that of insisting upon the “right to connect”.

Movements that struggle for real transition and transformation, the kinds that are devoted to investing in and creating systemic and lasting change, the kind that cannot nor will not be ‘repealed’, are the ones that fight for defining rights, not regulatory policy.

As Rutgers law professor James Pope once said…

“A real rights movement conducts the struggle over a long-term time frame, and it fights over issues of basic principle.”

It was, after all the civil rights movement, not the civil regulatory movement.