This is not a post about tax. It’s about something more important. A Federal Appeals Court has struck down FCC’s rule on net neutrality. Net neutrality means every ISP has to send along traffic at the same rate: it can’t speed up its friends and slow down whomever it doesn’t like.
Now I’ve said before this is not a political blog. But this post is off-topic for a reason: the Internet is the poor peoples’ press. This is how one person can take on the corporate Goliaths and the malefactors of great wealth.
If Verizon (of which I am a subscriber and through which this blogpost will go), can effectively shut me down by slowing my transmissions, should I have the temerity to say anything that offends some unretired vice-president or his/her political bedfellows, or even the government of the United States of America, then I am through.
And so is the freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
The late Frederick W. Friendly, an exemplar of broadcast journalistic integrity, once asked what would happen were there only three great printing presses in the country: would free speech and a free press survive?
His answer was to promote independent television networks, and the product was the Public Broadcasting Corporation, which survives despite the efforts to stifle it.
Now we have the internet, the greatest tool for free speech and a free press since the invention of writing.
No corporation, no individual, no one, repeat no one, has the right to suppress it.
Here’s the petition to the FCC to write a rule that will survive. I’ve signed it. You please sign it.
Verizon struck the final blow against Net Neutrality when a federal appeals court ruled in its favor and struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order. The FCC must take action now to stop the corporate takeover of the internet.
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Taishoff Law 
This has been brewing for six years, since Obama (He Who Knows How to Pick ‘Em) appointed do-nothing Julius Chenachowski as FCC chairman. Julius dithered for his entire reign, failing to designate the Internet as a regulated communications service subject to FCC jurisdiction via the Comm Act of 1934. His successor at the helm, Tom Wheeler, is an old cable guy from the earliest days of his career, the gent who master-minded cable operators getting exclusive municipal franchises, de facto monopolies. Big help he’ll be.
The real threat to content providers like Lew Taishoff won’t come from government, which is specifically legislated not to intervene in content provision, but from the telcos (of which AT&T and Verizon comprise 95%), national cable monopolies, and the largest content providers (like Google, Facebook, TV networks, the music industry, and the porn industry) who will get first dibs on the best service. (Oh yes, government too — these creeps always gift government, to discourage regulation. Maybe they’ll start charging, just like the military contractors, since taxpayer money is no object.)
The tens of millions of Lew’s will be scorned and relegated to the status of public access on cable systems, with transmission service that is noticeably inferior — unless they want to pay $100, $500, or $1000 a month. And on the other end, households will pay two or three times their current fare to access whatever’s still accessible, if the want downloads that aren’t reminiscent of things back in the 4800-baud modem days.
Funny how this huge challenge to the Commonweal doesn’t show up much on the Internet news environment. Consider it a taste of things to come.
Credo Action provides top-notch advocacy, but the real leader in the fight for net neutrality has been Free Press, which is always on top of these issues: http://www.freepress.net Go There Now!
(PS In 1981, while working as a policy expert for the California Legislature, I authored a public report for then-Speaker Willy Brown, “Access Rights to the Electronic Marketplace.” By “marketplace,” my co-author John Statton (later mayor of Cupertino, a fit reward) argued that the digital environment would be our society’s future agoura, the Greek square in which commerce and politics were accorded equal importance, and where every person could go to sell, buy, or trade in ideas: today’s Internet. Thirty-three years ago. That’s how much time we, legal and policy professionals who sincerely care about the First Amendment, had to prepare for this denouement — and didn’t, over and over. We smart guys and gals have in part done this to ourselves.)
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Two typos in my submitted comment on your blog posting.
In paragraph 3, “the” at the end of the paragraph should be “they.”
In the PS, it should be “my coauthor John Statton … and I argued…” (I was John’s boss, but it was a co-production.)
Attached below is my final submission to the US Tax Court in my current case, with amendments (mostly typos). I just noted it’s misdated. Hell.
Bob
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