Media Re:public

Actually, my talented colleagues Wendy Seltzer, Geoff Goodell and Steve Schultze did the very eloquent telling of the FCC that their proposal to give away spectrum to be used for “family-friendly” Internet, accomplished by network-level filtering of potentially harmful content, which I wrote about a few days ago, is wrongheaded on many fronts:

— it mistakenly treats the Internet like a broadcaster, which denies the Internet’s essential nature as a space for creation, collaboration and innovation;
— it will stifle both competition and innovation in important areas;
— it is in conflict with the FCC’s own policies promoting openness and neutrality; and worst of all,
— it violates the First Amendment (oh that!), suppressing large amounts of speech

That’s the supershort version, if you have time to be really enraged about this (and you should!) you can read the whole comment on the FCC website, in docket 07-195. And sign up for Berkman’s mailing lists, where news will surely be posted as it appears.

Update: My fellow fellow Harry Lewis has a lovely post on the absurdity of the proposed rule.

Image: Free Speech
Uploaded on May 1, 2007
by mellowbox

Tags: FCC, pornography, censorship

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