Non-Neutral Grammies

The Dixie Chicks won five Grammies, which leads Jonathan Rintel to remark:
As the Chicks themselves chronicled in their Shut Up and Sing documentary, after lead singer and Texan Natalie Maines publicly said in 2003 that the Chicks were “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,” Clear Channel and Cumulus, two giant media conglomerates owning a combined 1,500+ radio stations, not only banned Chicks music from those stations, but in some cases organized public burnings of their recordings.

Grammys: Yes to Chicks, No to Censorship, Consolidation, Jonathan Rintels, Huffington Post, 02.12.2007

What surprises me is that few people seem to get the connection between what happened to the Chicks and what can happen to the Internet without net neutrality. If the Internet is accessible almost solely by a duopoly of cable companies and telephone companies, what’s to stop them from deciding any given artist, aggregator, etc. is doing something they don’t like and blocking them?

Or even more likely, the flip side. Any value added business the oligopoly chooses to go into, what’s to stop them from feeding fast bandwidth to their version, and stifling speed and quality to the competition? The effect would be much the same.

The damage to the Chicks’ career is incalculable. And, witnessing the corporate media giants’ public burning of the Chicks and their music, how many other artists toned-down and censored their own music and public comments? Many, no doubt. So not only was this censorship bad for the Chicks, it was bad for all artists – and, for all Americans.
And so would be the Internet without net neutrality.

-jsq

One thought on “Non-Neutral Grammies”

  1. Hands Off The Internet

    What’s to stop them? You! Me! Consumers!
    ISPs aren’t dumb–they realize that they make their money from people like you and me subscribing to their services. If they were to block something, it wouldn’t take long for the story to get out, and consumers the world over would be furious about the censorship. The ISP’s business would be hurt as people looked to their competitors for an uncensored access to the internet.
    Nothing’s theoretically stopping ISPs from doing exactly what you’re describing right now–but they’re not doing it. Why do we need to drag the government into the process, exposing the internet to the possibility that the government will muck it up, when there’s nothing wrong with it right now?
    I work with the Hands Off The Internet coalition, and as you can probably tell, we’re opposed to government intervention online. Check out our website for more information on our positions: http://handsoff.org

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