FCC - Federal Communications Commission

RCN is messing with internet access and our right to net neutrality

[This post is for Greg Scott, who caught me in the middle of a rant about RCN over at Twitter.]

For about 4 months now I have noticed the change in service : I will get to YouTube but the pages load as slow as molasses. Other times, if I'm doing a search in Google, the page will take forever to load.

Today though, it's pretty obvious what's happening : I can't get into Google from my home connection. No Google. No Gmail. No YouTube. So I pinged people on Twitter and asked if anybody was having problems getting into Google.

Erica G replied from Boston :

I'm on RCN in Boston and having trouble connecting to Yahoo and tinyurl this evening. # [...] And actually, thinking of it, for the past several weeks I haven't been able to load YouTube videos properly, either. #

Melanie Notkin, who is also in NYC, reported the same issue. Maria Niles is on Comcast California, but she has had similar choppy access to YouTube in the past several weeks, making her wonder if she's living in China.

Why is this so important to blog and not dismiss as a possible "blip" or outage? Well, if we take into consideration all the services Google provides, the search company may indeed be the largest and most trafficked network of websites in the world. YouTube alone would make Google the largest video broadcaster at least in the United States.

Are you going to tell me RCN just happened to degrade service to the biggest web network and web services provider in the United States? As Seinfeld would say ... I. Don't. Think. So.

» read more | liza's blog | 1 comment | email this blog | 1689 reads

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Words to live by

Image found at Jim Crow Museum
of Racist Memoribilia :
Jezebel Stereotype

The power of slaveholders to exploit, expose, and control the sexuality of black women was overwhelming. Slaveholders could keep black women and their children in a state of near-nakedness while asserting that modesty and civility required full clothing. They could and did encourage frequent slave pregnancies through a variety of punishments and rewards. They then interpreted black womenâ€™s evident fertility as evidence of their uncontrolled sexuality.

The insatiable, sexual black woman did important work for Southern society. The myth of Jezebel created space for white moral superiority. Because she was a seductress, Jezebel justified the sexual brutality of Southern white men. Jezebel not only protected white menâ€™s morality, so assured the purity of white women by offering a sexual alternative to white prostitution.

The point here is that Jezebel is more than a demeaning and false stereotype of black women [...] Jezebel is a deliberate characterization that does a specific service in the context American politics and society.

— Melissa Harris-Lacewell, blackprof.com: A little on the history of the "Nappy Headed Ho"