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Civil Rights Groups Divided On Net Neutrality

HughPickens.com writes: Edward Wyatt reports at the NY Times that the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition have sent representatives, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, to tell FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that they think President Obama's call to regulate broadband Internet service as a utility would harm minority communities by stifling investment in underserved areas and entrenching already dominant Internet companies. "We got a lot of poor folks who don't have broadband," said Jackson. "If you create something where, for the poor, the lane is slower and the cost is more, you can't survive." "I think we're all on board with the values embedded in what President Obama said, things like accelerating broadband deployment and adoption," says Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and a member of the group including Mr. Jackson that met with the F.C.C. chairman. "The question is, will we be able to solve these issues by going so far with stringent regulation?"

Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers, like the Comcast Foundation, the charitable organization endowed by Comcast. But those organizations say that the donations or sponsorships do not influence their positions. "We get support from people on all sides of the issue, including Google and Facebook," says Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "We don't let any of them influence our position." For it's part, the NAACP says its formal policy position is that the NAACP neither endorses, nor opposes the formally defined concept of net neutrality but supports the need to particularly focus on underserved racial and ethnic minority and poor communities, while highlighting the importance of protecting an open internet.

2 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Computers are racist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Computers be all racialist and shit, invented by the whites and Chinese to hold a brotha down.

  2. LOL at 'civil rights'... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    'Civil rights' apparently means the 'right' of non-whites to FORCE themselves into white people's living space and lives, sometimes at gunpoint - remember Little Rock?

    Why don't non-whites want to live around their own kind?

    Why aren't all the poor, hard done by blacks in the USA moving to AFRICA, where they can be free from 'oppression', 'discrimination', 'racism' and 'the man'?

    Third world people = third world country.

    Your country is being destroyed by the Jewish parasites who have taken it over, and rather than spending five minutes finding out if what I say is true, and then telling others, you're actively defending these parasites, until your country is completely destroyed.

    Who decided that white people, and only white people, are going to have to watch as their countries are destroyed by the invasion of millions of worthless, hate-filled, selfish third world parasites?