FCC Commissioner Michael Copps recently gave a candid interview with OpenLeft about the fight to maintain net neutrality and used the recent AT&T censorship of Peal Jam lyrics to bring his point home. Copps said, “[W]hen something like the episode occurs with Pearl Jam that you're referencing that ought to concern all of us… [N]obody should have that power to do that and then be able to exercise distributive, control over the distribution and control over the content too.”
Coming from an FCC head, such talk is reassuring. But Copps’ forecast for the future of the Internet isn’t very optimistic, “We are seriously in danger of going down another road and it seems to me if you look back over history, if you have the power, the technology to do something, and you have a commercial or business incentive to do it, you can be damn sure someone's going to try it somewhere down the line.”
What Copps’ is foreshadowing is a reality that many starry-eyed geeks haven’t faced up to yet—an Internet that is as controlled and regulated as your television set, where the cost of entry to do business is prohibitive and distribution control falls into the hands of just a few corporations. You can see Copps’ full video commentary below...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH3y4yj9qic
