VP

If we were to lose net neutrality protections, which by all appearances we will, that would suddenly create all kinds of vulnerabilities for independent media. There are clear dangers associated with vertical integration, where the company that owns the pipes is able to control the dissemination of information, and able to set the terms by which we access that information. When we think about, for instance, dissenting political news sources that don’t have the resources to compete in a pay-to-play media environment, we see that there are obvious political hazards.

And more than that, we could start to see scenarios where ISPs don’t like the political views that are being disseminated from a particular news outlet. Without net neutrality they would be free to block or slow down content from those sites. There have been cases like this already. In 2005, the company Telus, which is the second largest telecommunications company in Canada, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website that supported a labor strike against Telus. Anyone involved in journalism or activism should be concerned about this kind of retaliation and censorship.

Political ideologies opposed to corporate control are going to bear the brunt of this. There’s a growing anti-monopoly movement in the United States, and that’s clearly going to come into conflict with the political views of these monopolies. In the coming corporate libertarian internet landscape, the Left is disproportionately vulnerable.