Quotes from this video

The notion of a level playing field, or what’s called network neutrality, is under seige by powerful industries trying to tilt the field to their advantage.In the 1920’s radio was a common technology in the sense that an extraordinary range of people were radio broadcasters. Political speech, social speech, religious speech was common in the States, and when people began to think that they could make commercial radio function through advertising, the Federal Communications Commission began to implement a very different idea about how radio would function.

Working with business and government, the spectrum was allocated in a way that made it so only the few could get access to the spectrum. By the mid 1930s NBC and CBS would be responsible for an astounding 97% of nighttime broadcasting.

Now in both cases what I’m describing here is an exogenous technological change. That initially produces and explosion of democratic speech. And this innovative uncontrolled speech threatens. And those threatened then react. They react to take a culture that had been unlocked by this exogenous technological change and re-lock it.

The phone companies now say they’re going to build a new network of internet service that will be even better than the one they promised in the 90s, but never produced. Once again though - they want something in return. They want control. Not just over the copper wires and fiber optic cables, but control over the internet itself.

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