Glenn Beck, apparently, doesn’t understand Net Neutrality, but attempts to spread fear about it using statements like, “You have a freedom of speech or the government. You can’t really have both.”
Here he is talking with Phil Kerpen, chairman of the Internet Freedom Coalition (an alliance of conservative groups that opposes all taxes and regulations related to the Internet), who has taken credit for providing Beck with past comments made by Van Jones. Now, he’s feeding Beck information about Net Neutrality, but as you watch, or read the transcript, it’s easy to see that Beck has passed more misinformation onto his viewers…
KERPEN: It is a very big week because the FCC on Thursday is going to decide what the future of the Internet looks like, if it looks much like the past 10 years where you have private competition and pretty much people can do what they want on the Internet or whether we have a much, much heavier government hand. And they’re going to take the first step on that Thursday.
BECK: OK. I want to start just real quick – Net neutrality, because it happens on Thursday. This is that everybody should have free Internet, right?
KERPEN: Well, essentially. You know, they dress it up the way they dress up a lot of their things. They turn it upside-down by saying that evil corporations, phone and cable corporations are going to block what we can do block or we can say.
Companies, such as Comcast, are now able to degrade or block service for things such as P2P communications. Net Neutrality is a solution to that problem, not a conspiracy to control the Internet and censor our free speech.
Science Progress defines Net Neutrality as this:
At the most basic level, net neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet; all content on the Internet is equally accessible, and once a person pays for access to the Internet, they alone get to choose how they use it. This means that providers should not be allowed to block access to certain sites or applications, or charge different customers different amounts for services.
Here is the definition on Wikipedia:
A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.
The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of internet access, and another user pays for a given level of access, that the two users should be able to connect to each other at that given rate of access.
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