October 26 marked one year since President Joe Biden nominated Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission. Since then, as the group Free Press (10/26/22) notes, the FCC has remained deadlocked 2-to-2 on critical decisions about how phone, cable and broadcast companies conduct their deeply influential business, while those deep-pocketed companies fight tooth and nail to keep Sohn, an actual public interest advocate, out of the job of advocating for the public interest.
As Free Press action internet campaign director Heather Franklin says:
This senseless delay is harming millions of people, especially working families trying to pay their rising monthly bills and those in Black, Indigenous, Latinx and rural communities that the biggest phone and cable companies have long exploited and neglected….
The power to return the FCC to full strength rests with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He has a chance to call this important vote as soon as Congress returns from the upcoming midterm elections. He should have the courage to take it. The Senate’s failure to act means big companies won’t hesitate to raise prices, charge unjust fees and discriminate with impunity, because they know this watchdog is toothless.
If the Senate genuinely wants to improve the lives of everyone who uses the internet or cellphones or TV or radio, confirming Gigi Sohn before the clock runs out would be a simple, meaningful step.
Featured image: Gigi Sohn (cc photo: Joel Sage).
Like FAIR, EFF is a corporate lobby group (remember when you promoted Omidyar-funded Evan Greer and Fight for the Future multiple times without disclosing that they’re both funded by the same NGO? Because I’m never gonna forget: https://fair.org/?s=evan+greer).
This woman is on the board of Omidyar-funded EFF so naturally the fake-Left Progressive ****s at FAIR are going to LOVE her.
To give you an example of EFF’s work they’ve spent years fighting against these measures lawmakers (the evil government that only exists to hurt free enterprise) want to take to make sure social media platforms aren’t profiting off things like human trafficking – or anything illegal, for that matter. To ensure they aren’t, sites like Facebook and Twitter would have to actually pay human beings to moderate their sites. Can you imagine?!!
They, through Sohn’s EFF, argue that platforms with literally a billion users can’t possibly moderate the content with human staff. But think about that for a moment…
Let’s say Mark Zuckerberg has roughly $100 billion in personal wealth. Money he accrued profiting off of Facebook and Instagram. Just my opinion but I think Mark and his family could live comfortably if they only had $10 billion. I mean heck, we’ve been told for years Pierre Omidyar “only” has 10 billion dollars – and he not only funds people like Sohn but also funds fascist movements across the globe with his wealth (Ukraine, U.S., India, etc). 10 billion dollars is a lot of money for one person to own. So what if Zuckerberg took $90 billion of his profit and used it to pay human staff to moderate his platforms?
Well – the platforms would be moderated and the problem would be solved.
But Mark and the rest of these tech Nazis want to keep those profits for themselves. You’ll see it everywhere at Omiydar Network: scalability! Scalability in the context of internet websites means your user base grows exponentially (from thousands, to millions, to billions) while your costs remain the same – because you refuse to pay human staff to moderate. (So people like me who Tweeted for a decade from the same IP location in New England are permanently banned from the platform for being a “Russian bot” without ever having an opportunity to speak with a human being at Twitter about it. That’s Scalability!)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eff-sues-invalidate-fosta-unconstitutional-internet-censorship-law
As always this is the kind of thing FAIR should be informing its readers about – instead of giving platforms to corporate lobbyists like Evan Greer and EFF board members. But FAIR, like EFF, is literally a corporate lobby group. Note FAIR quotes freepress.net in this article. Well guess who funds Free Press? Yeah – Pierre fucking Omidyar (as well as Ford Foundation, Soros, Google, Amazon, all the usual anti-democratic NGOs).
When you see stuff about Net Nuetrality spammed on Reddit or Twitter or Facebook – that’s not an engaged public speaking out – that’s corporate lobbyists like EFF and FAIR and Fight for the Future – all directly funded by tech billionaires – drowning out our voices with their pro-business spam. Which is what “internet freedom” is all about. Just like the “Free Press” – it’s about our ruling tech oligarchs having the “freedom” to own the press / internet.
God you make me fucking sick.