Dear Sir: Please Stop Killing the Internet
The House rejected the Net Neutrality bill last week, a huge blow to the notion of a free internet and a major notch in the belt of the corporate/government megalith that wants desperately to consume the one true egalitarian institution in this country.
What makes this worse is that 58 Democrats voted against the bill … among them, my representative, Albert Wynn. This actually pissed me off enough to write a letter, the first time I’ve ever done that. My usual strategy of carping and spitting apoplectically from the sidelines seemed ill-suited to the occasion.
Anyway. Here’s what I wrote:
Dear Representative Wynn:
It came as a shock to see that you were among the 58 Democrats who voted against the recently rejected Net Neutrality bill … but not as very much of a shock, I’m afraid. I’ve watched in dismay as, over the past couple of years, you’ve voted repeatedly for legislation that favors the agenda of large corporations over the needs — and the rights — of your constituency.
In my mind, the internet embodies the principles on which America was founded: a free-flowing market of information, an egalitarian forum in which the lowliest blogger and the mightiest corporation have identical rights, identical privileges, and identical access to the resources the network makes available.
This kind of freedom is not just one aspect of the internet; it’s woven deeply into its fabric. In a very real sense, it is the internet. So this notion that our networks’ gatekeepers should be allowed to artificially throttle the bandwidth of those sites that cannot pay for the privilege of full access to this public resource — that they should be allowed to impose the same kind of class structure on the internet that plagues so many other aspects of our society — does not just change our world wide web; it destroys it, and replaces it with something else entirely.
Capitalism can be a wonderful thing. It spurs innovation, it imbues entrepreneurs with the kind of drive and ambition that benefits us all, it builds bridges across social classes and economic strata. But unchecked capitalism is a nightmare, because it inevitably allows the very rich to rise to the top of the economic ladder, while the rest of us huddle at the bottom. That’s why we have safeguards in our constitution: antitrust laws, estate taxes and their ilk prevent our country from degenerating into the same kind of aristocracy against which our founders rebelled. I believe that Net Neutrality must be one of those safeguards.
I realize this letter comes to you too late. I wish I’d written it a week ago. But you should know that many of your constituents expect better from their representatives. Your voting record in many other areas is impeccable, and I know that you’ve come down on the right side of issues involving the environment, taxation, and the war in Iraq. But the threat of de-facto hegemonic corporate rule embodied in the rejection of the Net Neutrality legislation — and in many other of Congress’s decisions in recent years — is, I believe, at least as important, and worrisome, as the other issues facing our country today.
I hope you will take this into consideration in your future votes. Thank you.
I suspect that this was a pointless exercise, though, because (a) the letter will arrive too late to make a difference, and (b) Wynn will almost certainly never read it, and (c) if he does read it, he’ll likely discard it as the ravings of one of the crackpot Montgomery County people that were foisted on him during the great gerrymandering of 2002.
But still. It kind of makes me feel better.
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