Politics

Telecom companies working harder to serve you better (by keeping internet access limited, slow, and expensive)

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• Tuesday 29th May 2007

Unaccustomed as I am to haranguing people to take direct action about anything other than downloading cute cat videos, I heartily recommend signing this petition being run by ActForChange about the upcoming airwave grab by Verizon and AT&T.

Save Our Spectrum has more details.

Do the words universal, affordable Internet connections make sense to you? They don’t to the FCC, which is about to reward their corporate pimps with a deathgrip on universal bandwidth.

Please sign the petition. Soon.

“The FCC is about to give away a significant chunk of our public airwaves to the giant telecom companies — AT&T and Verizon — who want to make our Internet less free.

“Broadcast television channels will soon vacate these airwaves when they are required to go digital by 2009. If used right, these public airways will revolutionize the ways we connect to laptops, cell phones, PDAs, music players and other mobile Internet devices. They can deliver an open Internet into your house without the need for a telephone wire or cable modem.

“But phone and cable lobbyists are pressuring the FCC to sell companies like AT&T and Verizon our airwaves so they can hoard valuable spectrum, and stifle competitive and cheaper alternatives to their established networks. This would be a disaster. After years of phone and cable company control over Internet access, the United States has fallen to 16th in the world in high-speed Internet rankings, with few choices and some of the highest prices for the slowest speeds in the world. We will continue this decline as long as we let AT&T and Verizon dictate the terms of Internet access for the majority of Americans.“