Berkman Lunch on Net Neutrality with David Isenberg
I’m participating in the talk with Berkman Fellow David Isenberg about net neutrality. It’s being Webcast until about 1:30 pm ET: http://harmony.law.harvard.edu/webcast.s…. Please join us. We’re also on IRC on the berkman channel on freenode.net. Berkman has posted the audio of the talk and the slides. (Note added at 6:45 p.)
One of my concerns about this whole net neutrality business is just getting the word out. When I got an e-mail forward about it, at first, I didn’t believe it was really being threatened. It’s a very important issue we librarians should be concerned about.
I’m going to try to ask David if he has any thoughts about how we librarians can spread the word and convince people to take action.
I wrote about net neutrality earlier.
Addendum: I did ask David what we can do.
He highly recommends adding your name to the petition favoring the Markey Net Neutrality Amendment very soon. This bill is making its way through the federal government this week. It only takes a few moments to read and sign the petition. I realize this is getting quite political and quite partisan—areas I try to avoid here—but I support net neutrality and I believe we librarians need to be involved in the efforts to convince our political leaders that net neutrality is important. If there’s a similar petition floating around Republican or other party circles, please let me know and I’ll point it to. Comment below with a link or send it to me.
Congressman Edward Markey has more information about net neutrality on his site.
If you have more than a moment or if you need a way to easily tell others about net neutrality and its importance, this 2 minute and 50 second video explains the concept in ways that are easy to understand.
Still want more information? David has a succinct, yet poignant post with more details and links. He’s been writing about it on his blog a lot. His words
"Where were you when the DMCA was passed? Myself, I kinda slept through it, now I regret that course of inaction.Here comes a BAD LAW and you can oppose it, maybe even make it better."
will stay with me for a while, as will Joshua Micah Marshall’s of Talking Points Memo:
"Think of it like Cable TV. Anybody can start a cable channel. But if you can’t get on TimeWarner Cable here in Manhattan, for me you might as well not even exist. The Internet could work like that.It could have been that way. And it could still become that way. That’s what this new debate is about. Find out more about it. And see what you can do to make your voice heard."
He also does a good job of explaining net neutrality and its importance.
We’ll talk more at Thursday’s blog group.
I’ve been digging around in my little corner of the blogosphere looking for other librarians who are writing about net neutrality. I finally found a post on LISNews, as well as the news on beSpacific I mentioned previously. Of course, digging around for me right now means I’m skimming the 640 unread items in my aggregator. I’m surprised more of the sources I read haven’t written about it.
Addendum 5/5: My friend Bob pointed me to a video about media consolidation. In some ways, that’s a lot like what might happen if we don’t have a free Internet. Can an Internet controlled by commercial interests be good?
