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Obama to the Telecoms: Our Internet, Not Yours

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The telecoms say they don't want the government telling them how to run their business, but in wanting to choose who gets to send what bits for how much through the internet (which, we may all recall, was invented in government laboratories) they want to tell individual internet businesses, plus all the hobbyists, what should and shouldn't be done on the internet.

That's a sure recipe for strangling innovation and freedom and is the opposite of what the net neutrality does. Net neutrality says "you can't control who does what with the Internet. You can't choose winners and losers." When the government says "you must obey Net Neutrality" it is saying "the Internet doesn't exist for the ISPs, it exists for the country. It's not AT&T's network. AT&T holds it in trust, same as with the phone network. It's a public asset we allow to be managed by private enterprise. In exchange for that private enterprise is expected not abuse their power." Obama To The Telecoms: You Don't Get To Tell People How To Use The Internet

See this link for a video clip of Obama taking the Net Neutrality issue head-on in an MTV forum. A web-savvy small business, an engineer no less, puts the Net Neutrality issue under the spotlight, asking Obama about Net Neutrality with a focus on FCC commissioners and their role. Obama is unequivocal in his response.

"Right now the speed with which and quality of your downloads or links are the same if you're going to the CNN or Time Warner website as if you were going to barackobama.com. But what you've been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and portals through which you're getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different websites and webcasts. So now what you'd have is, potentially, you could you could get much better quality from the Fox News site and you'd be getting rotten service from some mom and pop site. And that, I think, destroys one of the best things about the Internet - which is that there is this incredible equality there.

And people, if you've got a good idea and get a great website - Facebook, MySpace, Google might not have been started if you had not had a level playing field for whoever has the best idea. And I want to maintain that basic principle in how the Internet functions and so as president I'm going to make sure that that is the principle that my FCC commissioners are applying as we move forward."

Here, Here...Huzzah, Huzzah!

Posted on October 31, 2007 at 08:47 AM

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