Comcast Launches Denial-of-Citizen Attack on Democracy
Remember those Net Neutrality videos you watched on CC a while ago? Turns out some corporation not only wants to control the Internet traffic, they want to block public forums as well. Last year Comcast, one of the biggest cable companies and Internet Service Providers in the United States, was caught injecting forged TCP/RST packets into users’ traffic to interfere with their BitTorrent uploads and downloads. FCC, or the Federal Communications Commission, therefore set up a public hearing to take place on February 25th at the Harvard Law School on a first-come, first-served basis. Based on discussions on this public forum as well as written comments from private citizens, the regulators may establish on what ISPs may and may not do.
On Monday, hundreds of concerned citizens came to the hearing to speak out on the importance of Net Neutrality, only to be turned away because Comcast “packed the room with hired warm bodies”, wrote CNet News. These meat puppets “arrived en masse some 90 minutes before the hearing began and occupied almost every available seat, upon which many promptly fell asleep,” reports Save the Internet.
Here’s a picture of some of these sleeping beauties (source: Portfolio)
“The Cambridge hearing is part of the FCC’s ongoing investigation into Comcast’s blocking of Internet traffic. But there’s much more at stake. We are at a critical juncture, where it will be decided whether we have a closed Internet controlled by a small handful of giant corporations, or an open Internet controlled by the people who use it”.
More of the story plus audio and video clips can be found on Save the Internet. Here’s also a comment from the Media Access Project.
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