|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
UN NAMES 10 MOST UNDER-REPORTED STORIES FOR 2006 Every year, the United Nations publishes a list of the 10 most serious stories most overlooked by global press. Developing nations, whose situations are often misunderstood or dismissed by news media, as too complicated, intractable, or of marginal relevance, take the spotlight this year. [Full Story] PRESS FREEDOM IS EVERYONE'S FREEDOM The freedom of the press is the freedom of the American people. Not its guarantor, not a metaphorical representation of freedom as an idea, not even merely a mainstay of a free system. A free and independent press is American liberty at work, building and defending itself against the slide toward secret or arbitrary exercise of power, as conceived within or beyond the legal process. [Full Story] CHINA PLANS "SMOKELESS WAR" AGAINST PRESS, DISSIDENTS China's president Hu Jintao has reportedly called for an intensive crackdown on media liberties. While China's government has sought to project an image of a more market-oriented, open system, it continues to forbid basic press freedoms and still persecutes journalists at an alarming rate. [Full Story]
|
INCIDENT RAISES SERIOUS CONCERNS ABOUT VIABILITY OF OPEN INTERNET WITHOUT LEGAL CONSTRAINTS ON ISPs 14 August 2007 When Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder asked Pres. Bush to "leave this world alone" in song, online viewers watching Lollapalooza via AT&T's 'Blue Room' webcast were not able to hear it. The company cut the political lyrics from the webcast in what band-members, fans and net-neutrality advocates have called blatant censorship. AT&T blamed an outside contractor and apologized for the 'mistake'. The blogosphere has now come alive with a new call to ensure by federal legislation that net neutrality is not weakened or rolled back in the interest of handing the baby Bells the incredible right to charge 3 times for the same service. Telecoms currently charge both content-providers and end-users (or content-consumers) for access to the network of fibers that makes up the hardware of the Internet. They are pushing for the right to stratify that network and charge for access to faster connections or broader distribution of content. AT&T has also been sued in federal court for allegedly violating federal constitutional and telecommunications law by secretly participating in the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, violating its own privacy policy and handing over data from millions of its customers' accounts to the spy agency. It's willingness to participate in the scheme has been seen by civil liberty groups and business experts as an unusual divergence from the corporate tendency to ferociously defend the right to independence from government intervention. The band issued a statement on its fansite, characterizing the situation as follows: "AT&T's actions strike at the heart of the public's concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media". A spokesman for Savetheinternet.com, an activist site pushing for legislation to protect the neutrality of telecoms toward the content running over the fibers they control, said "These small events — that is a little window, intentional or not, of the type of Internet AT&T has in mind for all of us". It is also a matter of understanding the meaning of permitting information online to be halted or filtered by companies that provide only the technological hardware for something like the Internet to be possible. Giving them the power to manipulate or filter content would mean the Internet as such would really no longer exist. For this reason, Internet giants like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Intel, eBay, Facebook, Earthlink and Amazon.com "Amazon.com, Earthlink, EBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Skype and Yahoo, as well as "Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, every major Democratic presidential candidate, and FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein have called for stronger Net Neutrality protections", again, according to Savetheinternet.com. A group of leading luminaries, experts and commercial pioneers has formulated a proposal for guaranteeing the freedom of information online, in such a way where business interests are not limited but are in fact served, but where any attempt to filter, give preferential treatment, block or control access to sites posted online would be treated as a "deceptive practice" and prosecuted under federal law. The organization is called the Dynamic Standards Platform Project and argues that limiting access to information or providing commercially driven "channels" or subnets posing as complete services for "interent access" would defraud customers and "crimp innovation at higher levels". DSPS includes Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, David P. Reed, one of the contributors of the original Internet Protocol design, Miles R. Fidelman, president of the Center for Civic Networking, Bruce Perens of Sourcelabs, also co-founder of the Open Source initiative, and many other industry professionals, legal experts and press advocates. [s]
ISSUE BACKGROUND: The concept of 'net neutrality' refers to the current state of affairs in the free democracies of the world, where those who control the physical infrastructure of the Internet are not allowed to police its content or to charge for provider-user access. It is a vital ingredient in the make-up of the Internet, because it guarantees the freedom of information that makes the web so useful to free society and so valuable to those who do well what works in that open environment. [Full Story] VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL: El concepto de la 'neutralidad de internet' se refiere al estado actual en los países libres, donde aquellos que controlan la infraestructura física de internet no pueden manipular ni controlar el contenido de los que publican contenido en esa red. Es un ingrediente elemental para garantizar la libertad de información que hace que la web sea tan útil y tan valiosa para la sociedad libre y abierta. [Texto completo]
BACKGROUND: Journalist Bill Moyers explains how Net Neutrality is really about stipulating for all media regulations an 'Equality of Access provision' like that imposed on AT&T after "Free Press and SavetheInternet.com orchestrated 800 organizations, a million and a half petitions... a top-shelf communications campaign. Who would have imagined that sitting together in the same democratic broadband pew would be the Christian Coalition, Gun-owners of America, Common Cause and MoveOn.org?" [Go to video] NET NEUTRALITY ACT: SEN. DORGAN EXPLAINS LEGISLATION TO PRESERVE THE OPEN INTERNET S.215, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) seeks to ensure the openness of the internet is protected against attempts by major telecommunications providers to segregate internet content and to charge for visibility. Sen. Dorgan explains how such business strategies would have a chilling effect on free expression and innovation. [Go to video] DEATH OF THE INTERNET: WHY NET NEUTRALITY IS VITAL TO THE INFORMATION SOCIETY Lays out the rudimentary principles of NET NEUTRALITY, the concept which has governed the open, global internet until now, wherein no network managers can control what content you are able to view over the internet; that standard is now threatened by major phone and cable providers (ISPs) and by legislation passed by the House in 2006. [Go to video] 'COPE' ACT FAVORS TELECOM STEERING OF WEB TRAFFIC The US House of Representatives passes Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE) in 2006. Legislation, if it were to become law, would allow internet service providers to control what content their customers would be allowed to view online, which websites they could use, potentially what type of information they would be allowed to send or to publish. It has been seen by many as the beginning of the end of the Internet... [Go to video] 'OBJECTIVELY VERIFIABLE TRUTH NOW SUSPECT' The foundation of a free society is a press with the freedom to criticize instruments of power and influence and to reveal wrongdoing as it actually takes place. War is not a sufficient reason to institute a system of broad censorship criteria or to rein in the news media, as if they posed a direct threat to the wellbeing of the nation. But increasingly, it appears that American news media are intolerant of facts as such, waiting for members of the government themselves to come forward with complaints. [Full Story] AT&T SUED FOR VIOLATING LAW IN NSA DOMESTIC SPY PROGRAM AT&T was once the nation's telecommunications monopoly, and abuses there led to the break-up of the Bell monopoly and the regulation of telecoms, with the intent of encouraging competition and achieving the goal of forcing providers to serve the customers first. Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit alleging that the telecommunications giant has violated federal law by assisting the government in spying on innocent Americans without any court authorization. [Full Story] GOOGLE TO COLLABORATE IN CENSORING INFORMATION DELIVERED TO CHINESE USERS The premier internet search engine Google has launched a new Chinese service, under the domain Google.cn, which it will voluntarily censor in keeping with the mandates of Chinese authorities. The announcement came earlier this week, as the Davos trade talks opened and on the same day as China's government announced it was ordering the closing of a weekly newspaper known for publishing articles on topics the Chinese Communist party's propaganda office had banned or which included criticism of government policy. [Full Story]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Original, Graphic Content © 2000-08 Sentido
