comcast is stealing your internet
by Stefan Koski
Published: March 5, 2008
Net neutrality is one of those issues that should be an important subject of political conversation in an age when corporate conglomerates are taking over every other media platform. Sadly the topic of keeping the Internet free is often far from our minds, even for those of us who rely on the Internet for our source of… pretty much everything.
Media conglomerates are nowhere near as apathetic. They’ve been actively trying to take control of the Internet any way they can for years now.
One of those seeking to conquer the Web is Comcast. Last Monday, the company was the topic of an FCC hearing at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The FCC wanted to know if the accusations that Comcast had been blocking P2P file sharing over sites like BitTorrent had any merit to them. The hearing was open to the public.
Well, almost open to the public. While the question of whether Comcast blocks people online is still up in the air, they did hire people to block public access to the hearing.
Ninety minutes before the hearing started, the conference room where the meeting was to take place was already packed with people Comcast had paid to fill seats. Comcast claims they only asked people to hold seats for Comcast employees, but many wound up holding seats permanently. Some said they had no idea what the meeting was about. Others fell asleep as soon as they got there.
The rest of the concerned public - well over a hundred people - was denied entry to the hearing because the conference room was already full.
Naturally, Comcast denies that it was intentionally denying public access to the hearing, but groups like Free Press and Reclaim the Media aren’t buying the idea that it was merely an accidental side effect of trying to provide seats for their employees (if that was ever their real intention in the first place). Likewise, neither should we.
The fact that Comcast would go to such lengths to try to keep people out at an FCC hearing on a college campus gives us some idea of what they have in mind should they ever take control of the Internet. Higher paying advertisers and higher traffic sites would be given preference over other sites, and just like that the Internet is no longer free and open for everyone. If they wouldn’t hesitate to block people from a meeting, it’s obvious they would have no qualms about blocking certain people (or websites) online.
If we want to keep the Internet free, we can’t let net neutrality be an issue that gets drowned out in the noise of debating the economy and Iraq. It has to be brought to the forefront of discussion - by both the candidates and the electorate. Otherwise, we may see the day when the first step to making a name for your-self on the Internet is to get a corporate sponsor.
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