Net Neutrality and other AT&T/Corporate/NSA activity.

May 22nd, 2006

I thought I would post a little round of nethappnings to be filed under related…

If you have not be subjected to the advertisments that have been poping up on varius weblogs lately check out the anti-net-neutrality propoganda. The commercial draws upon “creative commons like” animation aesthetics to position the corporate point of view as a grassroots campaign. I think another bloger summed it up nicely:

“it’s a typical propaganda cartoon that tries to hide a pro-corporate message under a visage of populism. It’s actively attempting to undermine actual activism by people like you and me, who don’t want to see the internet become the next equivalent of cable television.”

It always helps to check out the list of sponsoring organizations, coincidentally the corporate sponsors (bell south, AT&T) are some of the same organizations that cooperated with the NSA in the illegal Surveillance program. And while on the subject of the AT&T/NSA spying program we should applaud Wired magazine for publishing the concealed evidence that AT&T is in fact actively developing systems to help the NSA monitor all traffic over its network.

you may want to download the PDF time will tell if AT&T or the government can or will try to get wired to take it down…or I guess if the above carton is convincing they will be able to just degrade or eliminate access to wired news
To borrow from the sleepingPoliceman “In case you wondering what a diagram of the loss of freedom and privacy looks like, it apparently looks like this”:

How does this net neutrality stuff relate to metavid? Well glad you asked, the end of net neutrality would make sites like metavid very difficult. Only official sanctioned archives would exist with the support of official “content providers”. Participants would have a much more difficult time with building alternative mediations of the archive when bandwidth restrictions are more severe. It would exacerbate the unidirectional qualities of contemporary archives making it difficult for participants to create and share remediations outside of the space afforded by the corporate context provider. The space provided by the corporate context provider could easily become subject to official approval and a downward spiral of freedom can be projected from there on. To be fair we can’t predict the future but we should strategize ways to maximize our idealized vision of the internet. Empowering the bandwidth providers as content negotiators is a move towards broadcast models of media production and consumption, which is not our idealized vision of the internet.

So if we aim to support democratic archives we should fight this issue however we can.

Entry Filed under: politics, related