Verizon Fighting To Censor You

Verizon has decided that since it is a corporation (person) it has the right to censor your content, any content, on its networks, calling censorship another form of free speech. They are taking the FCC to court to fight for this alleged right. According to Verizon:

"[b]roadband networks are the modern-day microphone by which their owners engage in First Amendment speech," ..."Just as a newspaper is entitled to decide which content to publish and where, broadband providers may feature some content over others,"

According to Verizon any traffic that travels over their networks is theirs for the censoring. Seriously! Because anything you text, phone, email, including photos or any other digital communication you send that goes over their networks, since they own the particular networks, gives them the right to censor it. They are actually arguing that censorship is a form of free speech. If that maybe sounded a little repetitive it's because it needs repeating.

Below is the legal filing with all of the legal jargon. But to put it simply Bill Snyder helps layout why Verizon would want to do something like this.

OK. Take a deep breath. I think it's highly unlikely that Verizon will pull the plug on Web sites containing opinions or content that its board of directors disagrees with. I'm hardly a Verizon fan boy, but I simply don't believe it. Does Verizon really want to be responsible for everything distributed on the Web, including libel, theft, and other illegal behavior? Of course not.
So why would Verizon claim a right that it likely has no interest in exercising?
Verizon, in fact, doesn’t really want the power to censor, but it does want the power to discriminate. And by discriminate, I mean the power to treat different forms of content, or content owned by different providers, differently. Here is an example of how that actually works.
If you're a Comcast customer, watching a streaming movie via Netflix will count against your monthly allotment of data. But if you watch the same movie via Comcast’s Xfinity TV app on the Xbox 360, it won't count against your allotment. Comcast, of course, wants people to watch the content that it sells, not the content of a competitor.

If Verizon struck a deal with Microsoft in a world in which net neutrality didn’t exist, it could block content from Google search and allow content from Bing to move ahead. Or, it could create "express lanes" that speed content to users at high speeds, while content from competitors travel in the slow lane.

No matter how you look at it, it isn't right and would set one company up to abuse the internet as we know it.



verizon-metropcs-net-neutrality-brief-as-filed