Net Neutrality gravestone
If you needed more evidence that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is captured by big corporations and ready to take a dive for them on Net Neutrality, that evidence seemed to arrive this week. Many of you know that Net Neutrality, i.e., the idea that companies should not be able to speed up, slow down or otherwise herd Internet users into particular affiliated corners of the Internet, generated over one million comments to the FCC, a record-setting amount. The FCC’s website got so overloaded that it shut down, and the FCC had to extend its Net Neutrality comment period, a rare occurrence. But now comes Gigi Sohn, the FCC’s Special Counsel for External Affairs, who said in an NPR interview that:
A lot of these comments are one paragraph, two paragraphs, they don’t have much substance beyond, ‘we want strong net neutrality.’
That sounds kind of insulting. As if “one paragraphs, two paragraphs” or even a shorter statement that “we want strong net neutrality” wasn’t enough to convey a clear message to the FCC that the American people don’t want to be put in the Internet slow lane. In our opinion, it sounds like Sohn was saying that, if you’re not a big corporation with an army of fat cat lobbyists who can stop by the FCC’s offices to meet with Sohn and her colleagues, take them out to lunch and to sports events, and buttonhole them at professional and social events, or if your comments don’t contain emprical data and studies, your views don’t count as much.
In the interest of fairness, we can report that Sohn tweeted to Messaging Matters (@MessagingMatt) today, saying that her comments were in response to two specific questions, and to “listen to the whole NPR piece.” We did just that, and you can do so too, at the link to Sohn’s name above. Then make up your own mind about what Sohn was saying. Unless NPR did some very selective editing, we don’t see any relevance to the fact that many citizen comments were short (and in the age of Twitter, two paragraphs is hardly skimpy), other than to make a judgment that such comments have less value than the communications of the fat cat lobbyists. Sohn’s phrase about “they don’t have much substance beyond …” also seems to belie her post hoc explanation to us. Nevertheless, we added the question mark to the title of this post just in case this is all some innocent misunderstanding or selective quoting. In any case, if you think that over one million citizen comments on Net Neutrality should be treated with full respect and seriousness, here are a few ways to contact Gigi Sohn and tell her that. Hopefully she will agree:
Phone: (202) 418-0898
Email: gigi.sohn@fcc.gov
Twitter: @gigibsohnfcc
Image by DonkeyHotey, used under Creative Commons license. http://is.gd/bmg5iW
