Chronicle
opinion
By
Rex D. Cain
(NATIONAL) --
If you've been getting the feeling lately
that far right-wing extremists now in control in Washington, DC have
been busy
selling out your country from underneath you, congratulations. That
means
you're reasonably perceptive.
As part of that ongoing sell-out to
the rich and
powerful, get ready to say goodbye to an equal playing field on the
Internet
and say hello to mega-media corporations and the super-rich pulling all
the
online strings.
President Trump's had-picked GOP
extremists in the federal
government are about to hose the American people big time (once again)
unless
they stand up and stop it from happening.
"The
FCC intends to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality
rules in a meeting on December 14," notes Salon.com.
"Which critics
say will create an unequal internet that favors major telecom companies
and
provides them with the ability to charge consumers more for certain
services."
For years the huge media corporations
have been drooling
like junkyard dogs over the
prospect of taking control of the speeds on the "Super Information
Highway" - at the expense of all others - in order to make a huge
amount
of money.
And
you
know where their campaign donations have been going, yes? Greed,
control, the
desire for power and friendly well-fed politicians are at the heart of
all of
this.
Stopping
the Internet from being an equal playing field and controlling as much
of it as
they can has been high on the shopping list of huge communications
conglomerates for a very long time.
So
here
is information you need to know in order to take action like all good
Americans
should to stop Trump's FCC from handing over the Internet to the
special
interests in Washington -- the kind who line the pockets of lawmakers
in one
way or another and now expect a payback with the FCC handing them
control of
the Internet.
The
fake one million "pro repeal" neutrality comments to the FCC
First
off, read this report here by Devin
Coldeway over at Tech
Crunch who writes: "In
May, when the FCC released an early draft of its plan to undo 2015’s
strong net
neutrality rules, I pointed out that its case rests
almost entirely on a deeply
incorrect definition of how the internet works.
There can be no
mistake now that this misrepresentation is deliberate; the agency has
reiterated it in even stronger terms in
the final draft of the proposal. I’m
not going to go into great detail on it (my earlier
post spells
it out) but the basic problem is this: broadband has to be defined as
either an
information service or telecommunications service."
It is
important, he says, to understand the difference because those two
things
are regulated
very differently.
Next,
check out this new report here by Jeff
Kao over at Hackernoon.com. He found that "more
than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality
Comments (to the FCC) were likely faked."
He used, "Natural language processing
techniques to analyze net
neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and
the
results were disturbing," he writes.
A
bit more from his report:
"NY
Attorney General Schneiderman estimated
that
hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and
used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My
research found
at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about
many more.
In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may
number in
the millions."
From
Salon.com
on that issue: "Consumers
have
written letters to the FCC and claimed that their names, or addresses
were used
in comments that they had not written, and some were even listed as
having come
from people that are deceased, according to
the
Washington Post."
A
letter writer to the Washington Post says (Re: a Nov. 22 front-page article “FCC
moves to end net neutrality
standard”):
"I hope the Federal
Communications Commission will reconsider. Ending net neutrality would
open the
floodgate for monopolistic behavior, as large companies would then have
the
ability to pay to block competitors and to therefore fix prices.
It
would prevent the emergence of new businesses and would clearly not be
in the
best interest of the consumer. The restraint of trade would probably be
in
violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and contrary to the FCC’s
mission of
“supporting the nation’s economy by ensuring an appropriate competitive
framework for the unfolding of the communications revolution.”
Without
net neutrality, pharmaceutical companies could also be able to block
news of
new cures and alternative, lower-priced medicines.
An
unethical president or person of considerable wealth could create a
news
environment filled with falsehoods and propaganda. FCC, please do the
right
thing and keep net neutrality."
And
those sorts of things are just for openers.
Finally,
for a look at who the fat cats are that want to roll back net
neutrality,
and who the lawmakers are who's pockets have been lined by the big
Telecom
giants, check out this 2014 report
from the Sky Valley Chronicle.
You
are now well armed with information. Just where you need to be to go
out there
in the world and put an end to the corporate funded, right-wing
extremist
desires to kill net neutrality.