{"id":5670,"date":"2009-07-01T09:11:48","date_gmt":"2009-07-01T17:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/is-broadband-a-civil-right\/"},"modified":"2009-07-01T09:11:48","modified_gmt":"2009-07-01T17:11:48","slug":"is-broadband-a-civil-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/01\/is-broadband-a-civil-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Broadband a Civil Right?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<font face=\"sans-serif\">Sometimes you have to wonder if people appreciate the significance of what they&#8217;re saying. On Huffington Post this morning, I found an account of a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum gathering on the question of who controls the Internet&#8217;s optical core. The writer, Steve Rosenbaum, declares that <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/steve-rosenbaum\/is-broadband-a-civil-righ_b_222797.html\">Broadband is a Civil Right:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If the internet is the backbone of free speech and participation, how can it be owned by corporate interests whose primary concern isn&#8217;t freedom or self expression or political dissent? Doesn&#8217;t it have to be free?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>OK, that&#8217;s a reasonable point to discuss. Unfortunately, the example that&#8217;s supposed to back up this argument is the role that broadband networks have played in the Iranian protests. Does anyone see the problem here? Narrow-band SMS on private networks was a big problem for the government of Iran in the recent protests, but broadband not so much because they could control it easily through a small number of filters.<\/p>\n<p>If broadband infrastructure isn&#8217;t owned by private companies, it&#8217;s owned by governments; the networks are too big to be owned any other way. So in the overall scheme of things, if I have to choose who&#8217;s more likely to let me protest the government from among: A) The Government; or B) Anybody Else, my choice is pretty obviously not the government.<\/p>\n<p>Isn&#8217;t this obvious?<\/p>\n<p class=\"technorati-tags\"><a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/network%20neutrality\" rel=\"tag\">network neutrality<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/PdF\" rel=\"tag\">PdF<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes you have to wonder if people appreciate the significance of what they&#8217;re saying. On Huffington Post this morning, I found an account of a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum gathering on the question of who controls the Internet&#8217;s optical core. The writer, Steve Rosenbaum, declares that Broadband is a Civil Right: If the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/01\/is-broadband-a-civil-right\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Is Broadband a Civil Right?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-net-neutrality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-1ts","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}