Net Neutrality Redux
A couple of months ago I talked about how if net neutrality (such as it is today) goes away there was a risk of last mile providers censoring the net for political reasons. It didn’t take long to happen.
Wired is reporting that Myspace pulled the site belonging to Andrew Raff, the creater of the infamous “The Internet is a Series of Tubes” spoof of the incredibly ignorant and stupid comment “the internet is a series of tubes” from Alaska’s embarassment and telco mouthpiece , Senator Ted Stevens.
After hearing Sen. Ted Stevens’ now infamous description of the internet as a “series of tubes,” Andrew Raff sang the senator’s words over a folksy ditty and anonymously posted it to MySpace.com, where about 2,500 people listened to the tune, thanks to a link from one of the net’s top blogs.
On Tuesday, MySpace canceled the TedStevensFanClub account, telling Raff that the social-networking site, now owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., had received a “credible complaint of your violation of the MySpace Terms of Services.”
[snip]
Art Brodsky, communications director for Public Knowledge, questioned the timing of the takedown, noting that News Corp. has interests in the telecommunications bill put forth by the Senate Commerce Committee that Stevens heads, and that some in Congress are looking to regulate MySpace over concerns about pedophiles.
“Of all the God-knows-how-many separate postings on MySpace, this one was singled out,” Brodsky said. “You can’t fill out an online form to get something deleted; somebody had to make a specific call on that specific song. Given all that has been happening with Stevens — he was on The Daily Show last night and all the writing we have been doing — I just have a very skeptical view of coincidence.”
Well like I said, that didn’t take long now did it. Once net neutrality is cvompletely dead and buried you can bet incidents like this are only going to become more frequent and I don’t hesitate to say much more sinister in their intent.
See Jon Stewart’s take on Steven’s idiocy.
