The War Over Internet Freedom Heats Up
Published by Capital & Main on
We don’t block, slow, throttle content” flashed the bright blue GIF on my Twitter feed.
Huh? Oh, right — it was July 12, Net Neutrality Day of Action, and the animation begging my attention was sponsored by Comcast, the largest provider of Internet service in the U.S. and — weirdly for an opponent of net neutrality — it sported the NBC peacock that once heralded great shows like Hill Street Blues, Friends, Seinfeld, Miami Vice, and continues to adorn Saturday Night Live.
Weird because that same week, the Writers Guild of America—which represents the talents creating the lucrative “content” owned or distributed under the NBC/Comcast banner — was firing back. (Disclosure: The author is a member of WGA West.) “Changing the open Internet rules will mean ceding creative control to the few,” said Zander Lehmann, creator and showrunner of the Hulu series Casual, in support of a WGA West filing with the Federal Communications Commission. “It will give unprecedented power to ISPs who have already profited handsomely through lack of competition.”
Despite novelist Jonathan Franzen’s assertion that the Internet is “the antithesis of the imagination,” creative types from the WGA, alongside such strange bedfellows such as Amazon, AirBnB, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Pornhub, High Times, Chess.com and more than 200 disparate companies are engaged in a Game of Thrones battle over nothing less than the future of the Internet. Their opponents: some of the world’s largest, most powerful telecom companies, quarterbacked by the Trump administration.
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