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Now I'm no expert, but I'd imagine that if, some TV network in the United States tried to incite the masses to revolt against George W. Bush, and the revolt was put down, the broadcast licences for that network would be cancelled.

To make matters worse, the review is anti-consumer.

If you look at the Media Access Page, you will see that the federal courts force the FCC to "re-justify every major ownership rule or strike it from the books" every time there is a review.

The problem here is that the same corporations that want the relaxed rules also are among the largest soft-money donors. They buy the legislators and then demand favors.

OBlink: here

You are correct in that the media is made up of humans, and prone to make mistakes. But I think you misrepresent the entire situation with this statement, in implying that human error is the most significant factor in misreported news.

If you are not already aware, virtually all major news sources are intimitely tied in with large corporations that have major interests in slanting the media. Bias is a much larger problem than error.

If you check the CNN web page, you most likely see that the anthrax stories overshadow what is happening in Afghanistan. They are taking advantage of the current local scare to distract people from more important events happening elsewhere.

I suggest that you look into independent sources of media as well. They are error prone as well, but at least have a different bias than the conglomerates (unbiased media is a myth):

Independent Media

DMOZ: News -> Alternative Media
ZMag: Left Wing media resources
Indymedia: Non-Corporate news coverage
Guerrilla News Network
Project Censored: Censored news stories
Alternet: Alternative news, opinion, and investigative journalism
MediaChannel: "MediaChannel exists to provide information and diverse perspectives and inspire debate, collaboration, action and citizen engagement"
Common Dreams: "Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
The Public i: An Investigative Report of the Center for Public Integrity
Pacifica Network News
The Onion: Media Satire

Media Analysis

"Propaganda" at the University of Washington School of Communication
PROMO: Project on Media Ownership
Military school article on Psychological Operations (PSYOPs)
Media Access Project: "A Non-Profit Public Interest Telecommunications Law Firm
Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press
FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
The Poynter Institute: What journalists read
Columbia Journalism Review
Who Owns What
People for Better TV: "69 percent of Americans say TV is the most trusted source of information"

LS

Meanwhile many DSL services offer relatively fat uplinks

Consumer grade dsl is ADSL (A for asymetric :), usually capped at 128kbps upload. Business grade SDSL with a fat upload costs quite a premium. This shows that consumer DSL providers are just as disinterested in providing fast uploads to consumers as the cable companies.

Why? Because they want to be the content delivery system for the big media producers to the consumers. Or in the case of AOL/TW they want to own the whole shebang. They did not miscalculate in designing the networks, they asked the media producers and the advertisers what they wanted. Ultimately, their goal will be to make money not by selling bandwidth to consumers, it will be the access to those consumers that they give to those same media producers and advertisers.

This is an open access issue. Pushing the ownership limits from 40% to 60% is right on schedule for ATT's recent acquisitions...

First I'll mention that over 100 comments have been posted so far and not one of them mentions the phrase "open access", nor the Consumers Union press release on the decision.

In its decision the court in part agrees with Time Warner's contention that the rules violate its First Amendment rights. I just finished reading the excellent Rich Media, Poor Democracy by Robert McChesney, which contains a chapter entitled "The New Theology of the First Amendment: Class Privilege over Democracy" devoted to this subject. McChesney criticizes the invokation of First Amendment rights to protect anti-democratic control of the media. He notes that if the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect citizens from the government's control of speech, it is unfortunate that it is being used as a weapon by corporations to do just that.

We need to learn from what has happened to low power radio and not get behind like we are in open access. We need to create mechanisms for civil society to self regulate public resources, with the stakeholders doing the regulation not the government. And we need to make sure we keep access to our spectrum and not let the NAB lock it up.

So long as Excite continues to maintain it's public Internet lines as well, I see no problem with this. Of course, if they don't maintain those lines to a reasonable level, all of a sudden their customers will suffer when tempting to get to 95+% of the internet - a sure fire way of losing customers.

You put your finger on the crux of the issue. Given lively competition among service providers to end users this is not a concern. However, what's more valuable at this point, 95% of Internet content or consumers connected at high speed? The value of the Internet to the big money forces now is not in current content, its future markets. This is why Excite@home can lose $1B, as the article says, right now the game is to jockey for position in future markets.

If E@h (or any other high speed provider) can obtain a dominant market position they can dictate terms to content providers. More insidious, if a content provider owns a service provider they can exclude other content providers. Aol/TimeWarner? Didn't TimeWarner try to play hardball with Disney?

This is what Aol would have like to have done with the dialup crowd but all phone lines being equal it wasn't very compelling to content providers in the way that high speed access to consumers could be.

We need a vigilant FTC. Check out The Media Access Project, they are part of a coalition that filed with the FTC to block the Aol/TimeWarner merger.

So long as Excite continues to maintain it's public Internet lines as well, I see no problem with this. Of course, if they don't maintain those lines to a reasonable level, all of a sudden their customers will suffer when tempting to get to 95+% of the internet - a sure fire way of losing customers.

You put your finger on the crux of the issue. Given lively competition among service providers to end users this is not a concern. However, what's more valuable at this point, 95% of Internet content or consumers connected at high speed? The value of the Internet to the big money forces now is not in current content, its future markets. This is why Excite@home can lose $1B, as the article says, right now the game is to jockey for position in future markets.

If E@h (or any other high speed provider) can obtain a dominant market position they can dictate terms to content providers. More insidious, if a content provider owns a service provider they can exclude other content providers. Aol/TimeWarner? Didn't TimeWarner try to play hardball with Disney?

This is what Aol would have like to have done with the dialup crowd but all phone lines being equal it wasn't very compelling to content providers in the way that high speed access to consumers could be.

We need a vigilant FTC. Check out The Media Access Project, they are part of a coalition that filed with the FTC to block the Aol/TimeWarner merger.

Unless someone offers a critic of existing organizations, with changes to be made - I'd argue we may have to many organizations and creating another would continue to fragment what influence there is to be had.

Or in other words, what "we" don't need is to defuse our resources by building up a new organization, but use those resources to strengthen or affect change within existing organizations.

There are a lot out there. I started with three:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

The Center for Democracy and Technology

From there I was able to also dig up links to:

The Internet Education Foundation

The Media Access Project (non-profit telecomm lawyers, interesting..)

The Global Internet Liberty Campaign

Digital Future Coalition

Let alone those that aren't "purely" technical - such as the ACLU or People for the American Way, that touch on things like 1st Amendment (yep, American biased I am) rights. I could keep going and going, but if I didn't bore you ten lines ago, you would be now.

The likelihood of having THE "geek organization" are slim. Finding issues we can individually devote our resources to and building coalitions where interests overlap is a more realistic goal.