connecting*the*dots

Terry Heaton
Telcos buying legislation to screw you and me

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Meanwhile, there’s a House hearing tomorrow on a new bill that gives the Telcos what they want and will alter the way the internet is used by allowing them to divide bandwidth into a haves and have-nots system. By refusing to spell out net neutrality, this bill gives that authority to, of all people, the FCC and sticks a screw you finger in the eyes of small businesses and entrepreneurs in the U.S.

Declan McCullagh writes for CNet News:

“A November draft of Barton’s (Republican Joe Barton of Texas) bill (click here for PDF) explicitly said broadband providers “may not block, or unreasonably impair or interfere with” Internet access. The final version (PDF), on the other hand, simply gives the Federal Communications Commission the authority to set rules and publish violations.”

Barton released the text of the bill (the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act) Monday and scheduled a hearing for tomorrow. A vote could come as early as next week. Why the hurry? Because that’s the way flimflammery works.

Despite all the nice rhetoric about the Telcos needing to recoup their costs, the reality is that this legislation has been bought and paid for by Telco profits, and the only thing it guarantees is the furtherance of that. Call or email your Representatives and tell them you want net neutrality spelled out in the bill.

If you care about this and other internet freedom issues, I’d advise you to use this as a reason to pop on over to EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and become a member supporter.

UPDATE: Kevin Marks has written a smart post on the Telcos trying to force their obsolete dedicated pipes model on an already supportive network model.

Jeff Jarvis

BULLSHIT!

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Pulling back from the political absurd to the culturally sublime, it is also utterly ridiculous that the FCC contends it is enforcing community standards when it says that the nation as a whole finds bullshit to be among of the most offensive words in the language. Show me the man or woman — or, yes, child on a playground — who has not said “bullshit.� Show me one, and you will have found me a liar. Go to Google and you will find 30 million uses of bullshit. Bullshit is part of our language, part of our culture, part of our politics, part of our democracy. Those are not our community standards the FCC is enforcing. They are enforcing the fetish of the so-called Parents Television Council and their ilk. By stretching to make shit not merely indecent but now profane and by stretching again to include the s-word variants in that ruling — thus specifically encompassing bullshit — the FCC far overextended not only its dubious authority but also common sense. Gotcha again.

So let’s say the FCC reconsiders its foolish ways and decides that bullshit is, indeed, political speech and thus protected beyond even its reach. This, too, illustrates the absurdity of all this. What happens when that protestor yells the next time that Bush’s war is the byproduct of a rat or a monkey or an owl? Does the FCC has to decide which animals’ shit is protected? That is the level of absurdity we have reached here.

At the Foursquare conference recently, I questioned FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, saying that in the room we were hearing CEOs of major worldwide corporations calling on the FCC to pay attention to the urgent business of preparing our telecommunications infrastructure to protect us in case of disaster or attack and also the vital necessity to catch up to Korea and even France in broadband to protect our industry and our future. Yet, I complained, he was wasting his time instead, on farts.

And bullshit.

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Unbelievable. Read the entire article, it’s spot on.

I’ve wanted to put this compilation together for a while now. If you have any favorite moments that you think should be in the Top Ten, let me know. And without further ado…

#10 - Oh, The Hitler Comparisons
Disagree with someone? Think they have an agenda? I know what you’re thinking. They must be a Nazi. Heck, they’re practically acting like Hitler. Um, no… they’re not.
(via Jewish World Review)

#9 - Shrub Speaks To The Iraqi People
Hello, I’m George W. Bush. We’re currently busy tearing out your infrastructure, removing your delicate balance of religious participation in government and replacing your torturous regime… with another torturous regime… led by independent contractors.
(via On Lisa Rein’s Radar)

#8 - Drunken, Belligerent Donald Rumsfeld
What do you do in the middle of a war when you see neighbors acting suspiciously? You challenge them to war! Yee hah! Come and get some! We’ll Shock and Awe you too!
(via On Lisa Rein’s Radar)

#7 - FCC Media Ownership Vote
All we want is one, big, happy family in America. So let’s combine all of those pesky media conglomerates into one so Daddy Warbucks can control our every though with his programming and advertising.
(via On Lisa Rein’s Radar)

#6 - Libby Indictment
Who is this Patrick Fitzgerald shape shifter? Let me try to explain through an analogy… And oh yeah, by the way, this indictment is a good thing for America! Woo hoo! Indictments for all!
(via The Brad Blog)

#5 - Closed Senate… How A Law Is Made
Bill Frist is mad. Harry Reid slapped him and America in the face. Those are some long arms, eh? Jon gets caught in the crossfire.
(via onegoodmove)

#4 - Jon Stewart At The Emmys
Just sit back and enjoy. Classic Stewart.

#3 - Bush vs Bush
Jon manages the coup of all coups—a debate between Governor Bush and President Bush. This exercise  proves that open discourse between politicians can illuminate their differences on key issues. Ugh.
(via On Lisa Rein’s Radar)

#2 - On Jeff Gannon And Bloggers
Just who is that bald guy asking all of those obviously right-wing slanted questions to President Bush? Oh, he’s a right-wing hack/gay web site entrepreneur. And Colbert, I mean, Hitler, exposes the truth behind the blogging revolution.
(via onegoodmove)

#1 - Crossfire Gets Fired
Crossfire was canceled soon after this appearance. Coincidence or…? There has to be a way to get Jon into President Bush’s next cabinet meeting… and if he has any strength left, onto "Survivor."
(via Media Matters for America)

A few years ago I ranted about my fear of a society where the media is absolutely controlled by corporate interests.

Now, my head wasn’t in the sand. I obviously realized that we were already living in a particular version of such a world, as money and power drives practically everything in this country. I was just a little concerned with the audacity of the FCC to even consider the type of deregulation it ended up approving. Sure, it happens every day; legislation lobbyed for by people in power turns around to increase the empowerment of those same people. I mean, this is how the free market works. But this legislation goes beyond just making money for the upper class.

If you view media reach as ephemeral noise in the ether, then the concerns of this post won’t bother you. Feel free to hop over to Amazon and consume away.

The fact is that Americans are glued to the tube and this type of conglomerate legislation — spanning all media (television, print, radio and the internet) — has now allowed for a greater possiblity to create a lasting, singular, corporate perspective in the psychology of the moment and beyond. Consume messaging has been given even more proximity to our children’s brains.

They Live shades are looking pretty good right about now.

So without the prospects of landing a pair of magic sunglasses, what exactly can be done to defend ourselves from this destructive approach to creating a consumer culture at all costs? As a contributor to public discourse, I’ve always believed that the ‘net (in 1997), and specifically, blogs (over the last five years) were a key development in the fight to present a perspective to battle corporate or government disinformation. Why?

• With blogging, there’s no managing editor around with advertising pressures to censor (or generate) a particular perspective. (Well, that is until the corporate structure tries to jack the nomenclature of blogging to dilute it’s effectiveness outside the reach of capitalism)
• Blogs are also a time permitting endeavor; you can publish many times a day or once a year. There isn’t a revenue figure to drive towards, which allows for individual perspectives to be expressed at will

This break from the days of publishing via the standard print revenue generation model is something akin to the advent of the printing press, yet with the merchant nation-state taking the place of the previously empowered Church. Okay, maybe that’s a little pre-mature, but the possibilities are there. And what are the possibilities?

Over the past few years, the blogging revolution has become more and more accessible and mainstream with the advent of RSS and aggregate readers. With Yahoo! adding access to RSS feeds to their My Yahoo! content modules, blogs are one step closer to being mainstream. But this last step is a big one, steeped in moral conviction… a belief in the common man. Why?

Until blogs are automatically indexed as viable, alternative feeds when running, say, a news query at Google or Yahoo!, they are going to, at best, sit on the periphery of the conscious of the world’s inhabitants. The average person does not have the time, nor the patience, to sift through the pedagogy of managing RSS. Bookmarks are about as much as they can handle. Blogs do return in general search queries, but this “general return only” pre-supposes a value level to the quality of the information being retrieved. You know, a perspective or opinion or even investigative research presented by a blogger has less value than a feed from the New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.

That’s why this information retrieval concept would have to be one generated out of moral conviction. By keeping news sources limited strictly to incorporated, staffed and vested (in the economic structure of society) newspapers, a Google (or any other news search engine) is basically saying that only these sources can report and editorialize news. Even though Google has gone a long way in presenting perspectives from small and foreign sources, providing the chance opportunity for conflicting perspective, it’s still not enough.

It seems to me that with a search capability, news aggregator and a blogging tool, Google and Yahoo! are best poised to create convergence between the “professional” news organizations and blogging communities, within the boundaries of their individual interfaces. How accessible blogs become in the presentation, will be a litmus test of their commitment to providing contextual channels within the information age, while creating usable interfaces for digesting a world of information overload and disinformation.

It’s completely doable and their historical commitment to data mining and information presentation doesn’t seem to indicate that they’ll shy away from heading in this direction. Well, as long as blogs don’t impact their institutional investors or advertisers in a negative light, that is.