Minnesota Senator Al Franken sounds alarm on net neutrality. Are we listening?

The FCC has been holding closed-door meetings with big phone and cable companies like Comcast and AT&T as well as big Internet giants like Google around net neutrality. As Dereck Turner wrote the other day, the “deal” that they’re coming up with may be a big sellout.

From S. Dereck Turner at Free Press.

Over the weekend, Sen. Al Franken made the corporate takeover of our media, and the government’s acquiescence to these corporations, frighteningly clear. Our media system is at risk everywhere we turn — from our free speech online to the growing power of companies who own a massive number of media outlets.

A new study about Internet regulation and job losses is part of a desperate strategy to spread fear and obscure the facts about Nat Neutrality, and pave the way for carrier control over online content.

Two reports out in as many days make a brilliant case for net neutrality. And one of those reports is from the FCC itself, the body currently stalling instead of moving swiftly to protect online consumers from big telecom company greed and expand service and speed by codifying net neutrality.

Yesterday, Chile became the first country to guarantee net neutrality.

Today, Free Press, one of the nation’s staunchest and most powerful supporters of net neutrality, called on the Obama administration and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to “move quickly” to protect the Internet and net neutrality in comments filed with the FCC [pdf].

It’s well known that the FCC is having so-called “stakeholder meetings” with the big phone and cable companies about their proposed “third way” to reclassify broadband Internet and codify net neutrality rules, which would allow the FCC to protect the Internet for consumers. These meetings, coming in the wake of the court case that essentially took away the FCC’s authority to protect the Internet and implement the National Broadband Plan, have included all the big phone and cable giants – AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and the like – but have excluded consumer groups who are advocating for protection against these corporate behemoths.

Most observers see these meetings as the prelude to the collapse. The FCC will meet with the big corporations, they’ll come to an agreement behind closed doors, and eventually, the FCC will put forward net neutrality and other regulations that are either so full of loopholes as to be nonfunctional or absent altogether. In other words, most people think these meetings are where deals to sell out the Internet to big companies are made.

It’s certainly possible that these meetings are exactly that, despite denials from the FCC. But what if they’re something different?

I got a call yesterday from a telecommunications lobbyist who had an interesting and very plausible theory: What if Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, is simply running out the clock?

Congresssman Bobby Rush’s hearing on the Comcast-NBC merger in Chicago on July 8th shined a light on how Comcast-NBC hopes to get this through. They are hoping to demonstrate a concern for diversity and an interest in increasing minority ownership and leadership. Of course, why are they just now figuring out ways to make their corporations more diverse? Oh, yeah, this is one way to get the greenlight to merge.