As a satirical performer on TV’s Saturday Night Live and elsewhere, Al Franken has been an active user of the First Amendment. On Thursday, the now-Senator Franken told a public hearing in his home state of Minnesota that “Net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time.”
While Franken was speaking, it appears that a group of Internet service providers were meeting in private — sparking another controversy — to discuss their approach to an open Internet.
The public hearing at South High School in Minneapolis, was also attended by two Democratic members of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn. The ball is now in the court of the FCC and Congress, following the recent release of a proposed “framework” from Google and Verizon Wireless that has drawn heavy criticism from consumer groups and some Net companies for favoring a tiered Internet.
300,000 Signatures
At the hearing, Franken noted that the Google-Verizon plan would empower the FCC to “get this — publish a report,” and he added that, “when government will not act, corporations will.” He noted that if “companies write the rules that they’re supposed to follow,” those rules are “going to be written only to protect corporations.”
Last week, about a hundred people marched to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to deliver boxes they said contained 300,000 signatures in support of Net neutrality, which specifies that all data is handled equally.
The key fear among Net neutrality supporters is that, as Comcast tried to do with a streaming-movie application that competed with its own movie services, some applications or content could be slowed down, or priced up, by an Internet service provider unless Net neutrality is maintained.
If providers can determine pricing or service for specific content or applications, competitors could be in jeopardy. Net providers point to…