10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted, 240-179, along largely partisan lines to strip the Federal Communications Commission of any authority to regulate net neutrality. The vote has been viewed as mostly symbolic — the Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bill as well, and if it does, President Barack Obama has hinted he would veto it.
But the vote bodes poorly for net neutrality supporters who expected the concept to be enshrined in government regulation by now, more than two years into the Obama era. Those supporters, many of whom have gathered this weekend in Boston for the National Conference for Media Reform, have been deeply disappointed by Obama’s tepid advocacy and the weak net neutrality rules his hand-picked FCC chairman presided over last December.
Now as the political momentum in Washington seems to be headed even farther in the wrong direction — net neutrality represents a dangerous “government takeover of the internet,” its opponents have successfully claimed in the capital — US advocates are trying to ramp up their argument that the wonky, hard-to-grasp technological concept in fact represents the most important free speech issue of our time.
Senator Al Franken started using that phrase in December, and it has been a popular refrain in Boston this weekend as well.
If strong net neutrality rules fail to pass, telecommunications companies and internet service providers could block certain content on the internet, or prioritise content according to who pays the most money.
For free expression advocates, the threat requires thinking about censorship in an entirely different way. Without net neutrality, internet content could potentially be blocked not by the government, but by corporations (with the acquiescence of government institutions that won’t regulate them). And content could be blocked, slowed or prioritised not for religious, political, or ideological reasons, but for business ones.
“It’s not politically motivated, but it could have political effects,” said Aparna Sridhar, policy counsel for Free Press, hinting at what could happen if telecommunications companies carry only the content of individuals and organisations who can afford to pay for it.
10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted, 240-179, along largely partisan lines to strip the Federal Communications Commission of any authority to regulate net neutrality. The vote has been viewed as mostly symbolic — the Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bill as well, and if it does, President Barack Obama has hinted he would veto it.
But the vote bodes poorly for net neutrality supporters who expected the concept to be enshrined in government regulation by now, more than two years into the Obama era. Those supporters, many of whom have gathered this weekend in Boston for the National Conference for Media Reform, have been deeply disappointed by Obama’s tepid advocacy and the weak net neutrality rules his hand-picked FCC chairman presided over last December.
Now as the political momentum in Washington seems to be headed even farther in the wrong direction — net neutrality represents a dangerous “government takeover of the internet,” its opponents have successfully claimed in the capital — US advocates are trying to ramp up their argument that the wonky, hard-to-grasp technological concept in fact represents the most important free speech issue of our time.
Senator Al Franken started using that phrase in December, and it has been a popular refrain in Boston this weekend as well.
If strong net neutrality rules fail to pass, telecommunications companies and internet service providers could block certain content on the internet, or prioritise content according to who pays the most money.
For free expression advocates, the threat requires thinking about censorship in an entirely different way. Without net neutrality, internet content could potentially be blocked not by the government, but by corporations (with the acquiescence of government institutions that won’t regulate them). And content could be blocked, slowed or prioritised not for religious, political, or ideological reasons, but for business ones.
“It’s not politically motivated, but it could have political effects,” said Aparna Sridhar, policy counsel for Free Press, hinting at what could happen if telecommunications companies carry only the content of individuals and organisations who can afford to pay for it.
10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
One of the oddest strands of the WikiLeaks story in the US over the past year — and this week marks the one-year anniversary of the release of the “collateral murder” video that first launched the site to fame — has been the reaction of other journalists. Traditional media outlets would seem to share much in common with the whistle-blowing site, most importantly the core public-service mission of holding power accountable.
US media outlets, though — and even those that have worked alongside WikiLeaks — have been among the outfit’s harshest critics.
“They’ve been joining — even leading — the chorus calling for the prosecution of WikiLeaks,” liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald said Friday at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston. He held particular scorn for New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who has been on a public speaking circuit lately trying to draw a distinction between the responsible Gray Lady and its troubled “source.” (Just imagine, suggested Christopher Warren, of the Australian Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, if every journalist had to pass the personality test to which Julian Assange has been held.)
Theories abound as to where all the hostility comes from, and it does seem to be unique to the American media. In it’s simplest form, it may be rooted in pure competitive jealousy. But Greenwald and several other panelists Friday pointed to a more worrisome strand in the US media psyche — a fear of illegitimate interlopers among the professional class of “gatekeepers.”
This could have dangerous consequences, Warren warns. When US media outlets like the New York Times insists on calling WIkiLeaks a “source” and not a media partner, they make it easier for the government to deny WikiLeaks — or any organisation like it in the future — the institutional protections afforded the press.
Australian journalists get this, Warren said.
“They understand that if we allow WikiLeaks to be singled out,” he said, “it’s a threat to every person who seeks to practice independent journalism.”
One of the other great ironies of this story is that, as Harvard professor Yochai Benkler has pointed out, government officials and traditional-media critics have come down all the harder on Wikileaks as it has grown more responsible, and come more to resemble a traditional media organisation than a mere document-dumping one. From the “collateral murder” video to the Iraq war logs, to the Afghan diaries to the diplomatic cable cache, WikiLeaks has evolved in how it releases documents, whom it gives them to and what gets redacted.
Today, it functions an awful lot like a media outlet in that sense — but a media outlet that differs from the Times, in Greenwald’s eyes, in that it feels no deference to the US government.
30 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
Xavier Alvarez told some pretty big lies about his military service during a 2007 municipal water-board meeting in California — that he retired as a US Marine after 25 years, during which time he was awarded the prestigious Medal of Honor. When it turned out Alvarez had never even been a Marine at all (let alone many of the other things he has claimed to be over the years – a Detroit Red Wings hockey player, an Iranian hostage crisis hero), the water board member was convicted under a 2006 federal law making it a crime to lie about receiving military honours.
Last week, an appeals court reaffirmed a lower-court ruling throwing out the conviction on logic that has been praised by free-speech advocates: The First Amendment, the court concluded, protects fibs told about military service, rendering the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional. Other courts have disagreed about the constitutionality of the law, and the final word come could eventually from the Supreme Court.
Several judges dissented, arguing that “the right to lie is not a fundamental right under the Constitution.” But Chief Judge Alex Kozinski countered that criminalizing lies about military service could lead to making even more mundane falsehoods illegal.
“If false factual statements are unprotected,” he wrote, “then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as ‘I’m working late tonight, hunny,’ ‘I got stuck in traffic’ and ‘I didn’t inhale’ could all be made into crimes.”
(JDate, which must surely be making its debut here in sweeping legal scholarship, is a popular online dating site for Jewish American singles.)
