Net Neutrality Update-FCC issues its report:AT&T wins again

(also posted on Michigan Liberal)

Well after holding virtually unannounced hearings across the country for as short a time period as was legally allowed, the FCC, that self-proclaimed protector of the public, that guardian of the average Joe and Jane who use the Internet, announced its decision. The best way to summarize it is to quote the Jamaican philosophy, “Don’t worry. Be happy!”

The Consumer’s Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) has been following the discussion and has a lot to say about the latest decision. Read it here.

Read it and do a bit of teeth-gnashing about how far AT&T has gone with its plan to privatize the Internet. And to think, it began in Michigan when AT&T waved a few jobs in front of Granholm’s eyes, bought the Republican legislature, and heralded a new era of media competition in Michigan (translation: do away with competitors). Michigan was the model for how Verizon and AT&T were going to take over in, lets see, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Georgia. Those are just the ones have given away their media franchising: there are more states under siege.

But fortunately, Granholm said that she would make sure that NN was safe in Michigan. Yep, that would be at the top of her list as soon as she was re-elected... that was in the fall of 2006.

Granted, that was before the newly-elected Repubicans set out to destroy Michigan’s economy and governmental system, and allow CAFOs to pollute our food and water: that would distract anyone from election promises.

But nothing has been done to protect NN in Michigan, and as we have passed the half-way mark in 2007, nothing is in the legislative pipeline. We are facing the possibility that when this crisis is past (it will, indeed, pass one way or another), we in Michigan will have lost the last truly public medium, the Internet.