Posts Tagged ‘Net Neutrality’

Regarding the influence of right-wing media on governments…

Monday, May 28th, 2012

– Saw this quote by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair this morning in an article in the New Zealand Herald:

“Former Prime Minister Tony Blair said today that he couldn’t stand up to the Britain’s media tycoons while in power, telling an official media ethics inquiry that doing so could have dragged his administration into a political quagmire.”

– These big news organizations are, themselves, just one part of the multi-national corporations who are intent on controlling governments and their actions and laws for the ultimate benefit of the corporations themselves.   They influence governments, as shown here.  They take over mass media such as newspapers, radio and television to use them to promulgate their self serving propaganda,   And, for those who are following the Net Neutrality (, , , and ) debates and skirmishes, they are also seeking to control the Internet for their own benefit as well.

– And the irony is that most people do not know this is all going on and, when told, will deny it.

– Wake up people!   The thieves of your freedoms are in the house and well past your locked doors.

– Dennis

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Former Prime Minister Tony Blair said today that he couldn’t stand up to the Britain’s media tycoons while in power, telling an official media ethics inquiry that doing so could have dragged his administration into a political quagmire.

Blair’s testimony, briefly interrupted by a heckler who burst into the courtroom to call him a war criminal, shed light on the canny media strategy used to create the “New Labour” image that repackaged his party as more mainstream and business friendly, bringing it back to power after 18 years in opposition.

Blair, who was premier from 1997 to 2007, enjoyed strong press support in his early years, including backing from media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s influential newspapers. But he found himself isolated near the end of his decade in power due in large part to his unpopular decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The greying ex-prime minister said he long had concerns about what he once described as the “feral beasts” of the media but had to tread carefully where press barons were concerned.

– More…

 

Former Prosecutor: ISP Content Filtering Might be a ‘Five Year Felony’

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

– If you don’t know what ‘Net Neutrality’ is then this might be a good place to tune in. For an introduction, follow this link: Net Neutrality

– I’ve written/posted several times on this subject. Follow these links to see my previous posts on this:

– This issue is just going to get hotter and hotter as the corporations try to capture the Internet for their own monetary profit and political power. All the other media have been co-opted; newspapers, magazines, radio, T.V. The Internet is the only free media left.

– Watch this space (because it could vanish…). Or, as Joni Mitchell says in her song, “You don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone.

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NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Internet service providers that monitor their networks for copyright infringement or bandwidth hogs may be committing felonies by breaking federal wiretapping laws, a panel said Thursday.

University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm, a former federal computer crimes prosecutor, argues that ISPs such as Comcast, AT&T and Charter Communications that are or are contemplating ways to throttle bandwidth, police for copyright violations and serve targeted ads by examining their customers’ internet packets are putting themselves in criminal and civil jeopardy.

“These ISPs are getting close to the line of illegality and may be violating the law,” Ohm told conference goers at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference Thursday.

Charter’s proposed test of a system that eavesdrops on the URLs its customers visit, in order to serve them targeted ads, has already spurred a powerful Congressman to question whether the scheme would violate the Cable Act. For its part, Comcast’s heavy-handed throttling of peer-to-peer sharing by sending fake stop messages to its customers has the Federal Communications Commission holding hand-wringing public hearings over whether it should ban the practice as being inconsistent with its open network principles.

More…