



Submitted by Susannah Cole , The Pete Santilli Show & The Guerilla Media Network

With US Ignites looming on the horizon, and main stream media needing a upper hand on the web because of drastically falling viewership on cable and conventional airwaves, a federal court ruling just made your chances of getting your blog or small network seen on the web a near impossibility. If you have a favorite blogger or alternative news outlet on the web that you prefer over main stream media chances are you will not be getting your news from them very much longer. With this new rule in effect it is not so far fetched to think you will likely have to register as a normal internet viewer or news source to to determine the price you pay for internet service.

The FCC to this point has protected small bloggers and networks by preventing internet providers from blocking or slowing down access to content in order to benefit their corporate interest. But after the recent decision made by the D.C. Court of Appeals, that invalidated the Federal Communications Commission’s requirement that providers offer equal access to online information no matter the source, what is commonly known as “net neutrality” is no longer in effect.

Big corporate internet news outlets like ABC, CBS, and NBC all stand to have a huge advantage over their smaller competition and alternative news outlets by simply buying better download and upload speed and edging them out completely. It is no surprise that major news outlets failed to report on this important decision because the decision was in their favor.

NBC is owned by Comcast Corporation, which bills itself as the nation’s largest high-speed Internet provider. CBS’ parent company is CBS Corporation, which also owns multiple sports networks and Showtime, while ABC is part of The Walt Disney Company empire, also the owner of ESPN. These parent corporations all have a vested interest in striking down net neutrality laws and promoting their own content at the expense of competitors that lack an advantage in size or Internet service. Now big companies like Netflix, Disney, and ESPN can gain advantage over competitors by paying ISPs to provide preferential treatment to their company’s data. For example, YouTube might pay extra so that its videos load faster than Hulu’s on the ISP’s network, as explained by PCWORLD.

Unlike phone companies, broadband providers aren’t classified as “common carriers”—and therein lies the root of the appeal court’s decision. From the ruling:

“Because the Commission has failed to establish that the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules do not impose per se common carrier obligations, we vacate those portions of the Open Internet Order.” ”We’re disappointed that the court came to this conclusion,” Craig Aaron, president and CEO of digital rights group Free Press, said in a statement. “Its ruling means that Internet users will be pitted against the biggest phone and cable companies—and in the absence of any oversight, these companies can now block and discriminate against their customers’ communications at will.” The court itself admits that such scenarios are more than mere theoretical concerns: “In support of its conclusion that broadband providers could and would act to limit Internet openness, the Commission pointed to four prior instances in which they had done just that. These involved a mobile broadband provider blocking online payment services after entering into a contract with a competing service; a mobile broadband provider restricting the availability of competing VoIP and streaming video services; a fixed broadband provider blocking VoIP applications; and, of course, Comcast’s impairment of peer-to-peer file sharing that was the subject of the Comcast Order.”

The decision holds tremendous implications for the future of the Internet:

Big cable operators like Comcast and telecommunications firms like Verizon, which brought the lawsuit on which the court ruled, will be free to pick winners and losers among websites and services. Their judgment will most likely be based on cold hard cash–Netflix wants to keep your Internet provider from slowing its data so its films look like hash? It will have to pay your provider the big bucks. But the governing factor need not be money. (Comcast remains committed to adhere to the net neutrality rules overturned today until January 2018, a condition placed on its 2011 merger with NBC Universal; after that, all bets are off.) “AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast will be able to deliver some sites and services more quickly and reliably than others for any reason,” telecommunications lawyer Marvin Ammori (he’s the man quoted above) observed even before the ruling came down. “Whim. Envy. Ignorance. Competition. Vengeance. Whatever. Or, no reason at all.” The telecom companies claim their chief interest is in providing better service to all customers, but that’s unadulterated flimflam. We know this because regulators already have had to make superhuman efforts to keep the big ISPs from degrading certain services for their own benefit–Comcast, for example, was caught in 2007 throttling traffic from BitTorrent, a video service that competed with its own on-demand video. Amazingly, even after Comcast was found guilty of violating this basic standard of Internet transmission, the FCC greenlighted its acquisition of NBC, which could only give the firm greater incentive to discriminate among the content being pipelined to its customers.

The bottom line is the internet as we know it is about to drastically change. With more and more people getting their news from alternative news sources, that often go to great lengths to expose mainstream media and their bias views surrounding political figures and their respective parties, this ruling is disastrous. It is effectively the nail in the coffin of smaller mediums that post the truth for the truths sake, often without getting paid for their efforts, as opposed to rich corporations who own the media outlets that cater to their interest in Washington D.C. that are now poised to make it impossible to competitive on the web.

Love them or hate them, alternative news outlets on the web have played a vital role in exposing corporations, the miltary industrial complex, politicians from both the extreme left and the luke warm right, and their agenda to change the way people view and absorb their news on the web.

Alternative news will soon be a thing of the past if this ruling is allowed to stand. There is no data as of yet that tells us what effect this will have on the cost of internet service for average Americans but you can bet it won’t be cheap. But don’t worry, the government has a plan that guarantees all Americans high speed access on the government owned US IGNITES plan.

Socialized internet to go with that socialized medicine the left is so crazy about. For a government that can’t even get a web-site right it seems ludicrous to imagine they can run the whole internet, but they are going to do just that: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405805,00.asp

Sourced From: Media Matters and PC World and Guerilla Media Network

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