Chris_Dollar

Joined 15 years ago

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Member since

Jun 3

Writer for Killswitch "The Battle for Control over the Internet"

http://killswitchthefilm.com/

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Comment · 15 years ago

Is it time that the U.S. passes a similar law?

Comment · 15 years ago

These type of closed door meetings are all too common... I wonder how many private meetings like these happen without any disclosure or reporting about them at all???

Comment · 15 years ago

Yes, many citizen groups stand up for the 1st Amendment and tell our representatives that Internet censorship is not feasible in a functioning democracy. The problem is that the Big Six (GE, News Corp., Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, & CBS) have a megaphone and bags of cash... so often the voices of the citizen groups get drowned out.

Couple that with the fact that the vast majority Americans form their world view from the television or the websites that the Big Six own. Sex scandals and Hollywood gossip is discussed, Internet censorship? Not so much.

And this is increasingly not just an American problem, as many people on this thread are pointing out. We live in a global society (thanks largely to the Internet), the challenges of the U.S. are increasingly the challenges of France.

The Internet has done a tremendous amount of good over the past 20+ years, but there is a flip side to this coin as well.

Check out this five minute documentary trailer (on KickStarter) that seeks to tackle some of these Internet censorship issues:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-docum...

This documentary project is looking to get crowd-funded by small individual donations from the same citizens with the most to lose if we moved to a censored and centralized Internet.

Comment · 15 years ago

Sorry nandemo, I don't mean to come off like an a-hole.

Watch this three minute video and I think you'll understand what I'm trying to say.

http://www.vimeo.com/24632073

Comment · 15 years ago

With all due respect, I think that you are missing the point.

Yes, the uprisings in the Arab world is a very big thing. Which is very much connected to my point of criticizing the largest ISP in the U.S. merging with the largest content provider. And the lack of media coverage in not only American media coverage, but world media coverage. Keep in mind that the economies of General Electric (which owns NBC-Universal) and Comcast are larger than most nations in the world. Needless to say they weild a significant amount of political power outside of the U.S.

The Internet was invented in the United States and it was invented as an open medium (decentralized), this is the reason why totalitarian dictators in the Arab world have such a hard time blocking communication within their regimes that is critical of them. This construct is severely jeopardized by the merger of these two companies... and once this construct is altered in the U.S. it will permeate the entire globe, including the Arab world.

I do not want this to happen... but no one is talking about it... and that is a major problem. This problem is not just the United States' problem, it is the world's problem.

Comment · 15 years ago

I agree it is very hard to compare the United States with Europe, but there are many similarities and a ton of cross over in ownership. American media firms that are competitors in the United States are many times joined at the hip in Europe. There is a ton of collusion going on.

Ben Bagdikian, former Berkeley Journalism Dean and author of "Media Monopoly" has spent 30 years painstakingly chronicling these relationships.

These media conglomerates are constantly merging and getting more powerful by the day. They of course have their sights firmly on taking "control" of the Internet (will there always be some dissension...sure on the fringes of society) But those that think that the Internet will always have to be an open medium are naive, remember everyone said the same thing about radio in the 1920s.

One more thing to think about when we compare Europe to the US. One must look at French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy and his attempts "civilize" the Internet which is really a code for “regulations favorable to big business and the national security state.

Full story here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/france-attem...

The difference is the French citizens on the whole are more engaged (as braindeomon points out) so they haven't put up with Sarkozy's proposals... unlike the American populace who are largely uninformed on what's going on politically (outside of Congressman Weiner's antics).