Toward a Neutral Net

Baby Steps.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said today that the Commission is wrapping up its investigation of Comcast's network management practices. Chairman Martin is recommending that his fellow commissioners find that Comcast violated the FCC's September 2005 principles that broadband networks be "widely deployed, open, affordable and accessible to all consumers."

For our part, we believe that such a Commission order will provide useful clarity on what types of practices are acceptable under the agency's Internet freedom principles, and help ensure that today's broadband networks remain open platforms to the Internet. No broadband company, including Comcast, should be allowed to employ traffic management practices that harm the interests of consumers, and the Internet itself, by failing to deliver fair access to all of the Net’s resources.

Neutrality is an issue of growing concern as the internet becomes (for better or worse) a larger part of our daily lives, careers, and even our politics. Read more about this issue here.

Petition: Let Our Congress "Tweet"

In my Inbox, from the good folks at the Sunlight Foundation:

Dear Sunlighter,

Shouldn't members of Congress be able to connect with all of us freely and easily online? I'd guess most of you would think that's a good idea. So, when Sunlight's Open House Project Google group got riled up this week about this issue (see http://tinyurl.com/59tvm2/), we were inspired to do something to rally citizens to ensure lawmakers can freely connect with us all online.

In that spirit, we just launched a new campaign, "Let Our Congress Tweet," (http://letourcongresstweet.org) to urge Congress to create clear guidelines about how lawmakers can use the Internet to communicate using Web services like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.