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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.
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.
What confuses me is how Net Neutrality could do anything but help the urban and rural poor because Net Neutrality aims to prevent ISPs from discriminating between the sources and destinations of packets meaning that the traffic of non-profits (for example) and will be equally served by ISP networks in the US to the users of those networks.
Am I missing something here?
My suspicion is that the advocacy groups don't have a good understanding of how Net Neutrality will protect all users and content providers from ISP exploitation and that these advocacy groups have been given misinformation by advisors who, in fact, are in the back pocket's of the ISPs.
Is this what's going on?
blog
I hate to have to point this out but Rainbow/PUSH isn't a "civil rights organization" by any stretch of the imagination. It's Jackson's personal vehicle for racialist shakedowns like this:
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...
He has about $10M in the bank:
http://www.celebritynetworth.c...
The only "civil rights" he cares about are those of his bank account.
Do you have ESP?
Jesse Jackson represents Jesse Jackson, first and foremost. I don't know anyone who doesn't wish he would just go the fuck away, and that includes the [few] black people I know well enough to know how they feel about Jesse. (Hey, I grew up in whitey-white land, Mexicans aside, so sue me.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"