Freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom to internet : That's what net neutrality is all about

And Ask A Ninja makes it effing hilarious to understand.

[via YouTube - Ask a Ninja: Special Delivery 4: Net Neutrality]

Doesn't he sound like Strongbad?

Now back to net neutrality.

The people advertising on our site claiming they want to save the internet by pushing their "Hands off the internet" campaign, are nothing but a bunch of telcos, cable companies and AOL looking to use "free market" untruths to keep competition and innovation out of the reach of everybody bu them.

In their rationale, technology trumps civil rights. They claim that since they are corporations and not vehicles or pipelines of civil liberties, they have nothing to do with equal access or freedom of speech. In their world, if the technology is there to build walls around access, they want to have the unfeterred ability to do so if it brings them an extra buck of profit. Because, you know, "stockholders" have more rights over what a corporation does than "citizens". Unfortunately stockholders these days end up being other corporations, not individuals like you and me.

To which I add this quote from John Kenneth Galbraith: Free Market Fraud | The Progressive]:

In the textbooks, there is no bureaucratic aspiration, no reward for bureaucratic achievement, no bureaucratic enhancement by merger and acquisition, and no personally established compensation. Bypassing all of this is not a wholly innocent fraud.

A more comprehensive fraud dominates scholarly economic and political thought. That is the presumption of a market economy separate from the state. Most economists concede a stabilizing role to the state, even those who urgently seek an escape from reality by assigning a masterful and benign role to Alan Greenspan and the central bank. And all but the most doctrinaire accept the need for regulation and legal restraint by the state. But few economists take note of the cooptation by private enterprise of what are commonly deemed to be functions of the state. This is hidden by the everyday reference to the public and private sectors, one of our clearest examples of innocent fraud.

Take the common outcry about corporate welfare. Here the private firm, as it is called, receives a public subsidy for its product or service. But what is called corporate welfare is a minor detail. Far more important is the full-fledged takeover by private industry of public decision-making and government spending.

The clearest case is the weapons industry. Given the industry's command of the Congress and the Pentagon, the defense firms create the demand for weaponry, prescribe the technological development of our defense system, and supply the needed funds --the defense budget. There is no novelty here. This is the military-industrial complex, a characterization that goes safely back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Any notion of a separation between the public and a private sector --between industry and government-- is here plainly ludicrous.

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