This is an excellent, eloquent piece of writing directed at the FCC. If you are going to write a letter in the same spirit, you should use some of these points! jp
Public opinions are now open via an official FCC email regarding the proposed net neutrality rules proposed this week by the board and Chairman Wheeler. This is what I wrote. You can send your own at openinternet@fcc.gov and I urge you to do so.
—————————-
To FCC Board Members and Chairman Wheeler,
My name is Wes Smith, and I wanted to make a statement regarding the proposed net neutrality regulations recently put forth by the board members of your committee. I do not feel that these proposed rules will leave a positive effect on the internet and will ultimately hurt consumers, stifle innovation, and establish a harmful precedent for future technological advances.
I understand that Mr. Wheeler has stated that there will careful regulation of business practices, essentially stating that companies purchasing faster access to customers is ok so long as internet providers do not place other websites in a…
I search the Internet for sites of interest almost daily. There are so many sites with great writing and a lot of passion. They often are up for a year or six month, … and then there are no more posts. It’s like the skeleton left after a body decomposes.
So, I try to encourage people to post and keep on posting. I ran across this student, David Watson, and his web site on net neutrality. I like his attitude and his writing.
Please give him a read and encourage him to continue posting and developing his ideas.
James Pilant
Net Neutrality, Don’t get caught in the slow lane!
We connect to the web using pipes owned by major telephone and cable companies. These companies such as Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, and AT & T want to change that. They want to establish their own parts of the web, and to make sites pay them more money to use it. Now they would like to charge you for access to the network, and then charge you again for the things you do while you’re online. These big companies want to set up a restricted fast-lane on the internet, a fast-lane that would only be usable for their partners and services that have complied with the additional fees. In order to achieve this, these companies will be destroying one of the internet’s founding principles known as net neutrality.
This issue is meaningful to me because if net neutrality becomes a reality, innovators who want to start small and work there way up to the top and become the big thing will be shut out of the big picture and their dreams will be destroyed. There are rules in place to prevent internet service providers from blocking or “unreasonable discriminating” against any legal website or other piece of online content. If they eliminate net neutrality, they will be destroying one of the internet’s founding principles known as net neutrality. These rules guarantee equal opportunities for all web sites and internet technologies. Without those rules, the internet will turn into how you can buy a cable package today that has some channels and excludes others.
‘Hardworking people’ – people on very high salaries, such as company executives.
‘Striver’ – somebody who works for a low salary, and who doesn’t object to a pay cut. Alternatively, somebody who works for a high salary, and who doesn’t object to a pay rise.
‘Skiver’ – somebody who is temporarily too ill to work…
A recent blog piece by psychologist Kenneth Pope explaining how reports of torture can be easily denied, discounted, and dismissed strongly resonated with my understanding of the dynamics of bullying and abuse at work. I thought it worth sharing and discussing with readers here.
Three cognitive strategies
Dr. Pope identifies “three common cognitive strategies for denying, discounting, dismissing, or distorting instances of torture and for turning away from effective steps to stop it and hold those responsible accountable”:
First, “reflexively dismissing all evidence as questionable, incomplete, misleading, false, or in some other way inadequate.”
Second, “using euphemism, abstraction, and other linguistic transformations” to hide the abuse.
Third, by “turning away: ‘I’m not involved,’ ‘There is nothing I can do about it,’ ‘I have no authority, jurisdiction, power, or influence,’ ‘This is no concern of mine,’ etc.”
Applied to workplace bullying
I quickly thought of workplace bullying when I read this blog post.
I guess it is the nature of the beast. Whenever a profit can be made by converting a public asset into a private one, the knives are out. The reasons for net neutrality are so obvious and so important, it should not be necessary for me to repeat them here. The idea of favoring one user over another has one major advantage over net neutrality, the enormous profits possible on services already provided.
James Pilant
Net neutrality: What is it, and why is the U.S. about to lose it? | Al Jazeera America
For decades, Americans have taken for granted that every website, service and app is treated equally by their Internet service providers. This principle, dubbed Net neutrality, is what allows startups and large corporations to compete on a level playing field, ensuring that Internet providers can’t pick winners and losers by blocking websites or having some load faster than others.
But Internet advocates warn that under a new set of rules scheduled to be introduced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday, this guarantee will be effectively gone, allowing Internet service providers to give prioritized access to websites that pay a premium — and slower service to everyone else.
The FCC proposal would be welcome news for broadband Internet providers like Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, some of which have already begun experimenting with charging online services for fast-lane access to their customers. FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has tried to reassure critics that these arrangements would be strictly regulated on a case-by-case basis. But a growing coalition of Net neutrality advocates, tech companies, investors and members of Congress have slammed the anticipated proposal, calling it “a threat to the Internet” as a domain for free speech and commerce.
“It’s going to be ruinous for innovation online,” said April Glaser, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It directs people away from newer, innovative services that might not be able to afford that price tier.”
First off, the web could get more expensive. The impact on the average Internet user will likely not be felt right away. But over time, websites would probably pass on to consumers the costs of paying for high-speed access, according to Harold Feld, a senior vice president at the consumer group Public Knowledge.
In addition, it could become difficult to view certain websites owned by companies that can’t afford to pay for access to an Internet fast lane, Feld said.
On top of Internet users potentially paying more, they would also be more confused, Feld said. Under the proposed rules, people would need to make sense of a fragmented Internet landscape where the time it takes to load an online video would depend on whether that website paid extra to their Internet provider. Consumers may start choosing their Internet providers based on which websites they like to visit.
Feld compared the situation to the exclusive deals that AT&T and Apple once made that only allowed AT&T subscribers to purchase the iPhone.
This sounds pretty frustrating. It would be. Under the FCC’s proposed rules, the quality of online streaming services like Netflix or HBO Go would depend on whether those services are paying your Internet provider or not, Feld said.
“It will become more fragmented and more frustrating,” he added.
The proposed rules could affect not just entertainment, but also education. If schools use an online curriculum made by a company that cut a deal with Verizon, students who subscribe to Verizon’s Internet service at home would have an advantage over other students who subscribe to another provider, Feld said.
This is simple intelligence. I wish everybody did this. Remember, I emphasize over and over again the importance of facts and reason in business ethics. How do you get those watching nonsense on television?
Generally voting rights are not considered a business ethics issue but they are the subject of business lobbying. Two of the organizations heavily committed to voting restrictions are ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Americans for Prosperity are in large part corporate financed. Would it be a logical assumption that if corporate interests are best served by less democracy, than less democracy will be lobbied for? We’re also seeing this in school privatization where local control is superseded so that school board elections don’t interrupt the process of moving the money. It may well be that corporations being oligarchal in structure themselves prefer other creatures of the same species. Red China with its capitalist heresy intact could be the natural home for the American corporation. After all, they speak the same language of power and disdain for the rabble whose desire to breath air and drink water are serious encumbrances to the pursuit of power and profit.
Of course, the problem with China is that benefits conferred may be taken away. A nation under an oligarchy may have too powerful a central government for a corporation to feel security – just as a democracy may have to much self government for a corporation to feel secure. Does that mean that corporations naturally act in conflict against nations, all nations, seeking a continuous round of benefits concessions and controls? If that were so, we individuals in the wake of Citizens United are pawns in a much larger struggle.
The corporate form is a creature of the state, at least for now. They desire the status of independent nations and the new trans-pacific trade agreement is designed to help them achieve this. But that “free trade” agreement is in serious difficulty. So we still have time to act before the leave our jurisdiction. We Americans can change the form of their organization and we should consider this seriously. National registration of corporations is the most logical step. The corporations can play havoc with the states playing one off against another, and they’ve been doing it for years. Let’s make them play in the big leagues.
James Pilant
When ‘patriots’ unite to restrict voting rights | Al Jazeera America
For groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council, measures that restrict ballot access are one point in a larger agenda. The states in which Republican governors are passing restrictions on voting — such as Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina — are the same places where conservative lawmakers have tried to roll back people’s voice in the workplace, curtailing union rights and inhibiting employees’ opportunities to have collective representation. Taken together, these efforts align with a vision of America that concentrates political power in the hands of a wealthy few.
Most offensive of all is that the same wealthy donors restricting the influence of regular voters are also actively seeking to expand the power of money in politics, supporting Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United v. FEC, which eliminated restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations, associations and labor unions.
Conservative billionaires such as Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers and the politicians they support have every right to debate their views. Like all other citizens in our democracy, they should enjoy the freedom to present their opinions in the public sphere. But when their agenda involves expanding the already enormous influence of big money in politics while limiting access to the polls by ordinary citizens, their actions become a cynical assault on the American system and American values they purport to uphold.
The Republican legislature and the Republican governor passed this law in 2012. There was almost zero evidence of voter fraud, but they thought it was a pretty good way to help Romney win (watch this if you don’t believe me).
And then, even when it didn’t help Romney, I guess they looked at some demographic trends and kept thinking it was a good idea and so, every election, we’d get these instructions about what we were supposed to say (it’s not required YET, but we’re requested to request proof that you are you) and sheets of paper telling people that soon they’d have to somehow try to get an ID if they didn’t have one – though, as it turned out, it wouldn’t have been easy:
Required IDs were only available through 71 PennDOT Drivers Licensing Centers across the state. Five of the 71 DLCs are located in Philadelphia, nine counties have no DLCs at all, and DLCs are openly only one day per week in nine counties and two days per week thirteen counties. The Pennsylvania Department of State provided too little access, no financial support to providing IDs to those without access, and no alternatives to obtaining the required IDs.
Anyway, the registered Republicans were all over this. They’d come in and triumphantly whip out their driver’s licenses. It’s not required, we’d say. Well it should be, they’d say. “Voting should be a privilege, not a right,” one even said. There was a lot of huffing and puffing on both sides.
Now, it’s dead. The Commonwealth Court ruled against it, and our fine Governor Corbett has finally said he’ll no longer fight to get it reinstated.
The Republican legislature and the Republican governor passed this law in 2012. There was almost zero evidence of voter fraud, but they thought it was a pretty good way to help Romney win (watch this if you don’t believe me).
And then, even when it didn’t help Romney, I guess they looked at some demographic trends and kept thinking it was a good idea and so, every election, we’d get these instructions about what we were supposed to say (it’s not required YET, but we’re requested to request proof that you are you) and sheets of paper telling people that soon they’d have to somehow try to get an ID if they didn’t have one – though, as it turned out, it wouldn’t have been easy:
Required IDs were only available through 71 PennDOT Drivers Licensing Centers across the state. Five of the 71 DLCs are located in Philadelphia, nine counties have no DLCs at all, and DLCs are openly only one day per week in nine counties and two days per week thirteen counties. The Pennsylvania Department of State provided too little access, no financial support to providing IDs to those without access, and no alternatives to obtaining the required IDs.
Anyway, the registered Republicans were all over this. They’d come in and triumphantly whip out their driver’s licenses. It’s not required, we’d say. Well it should be, they’d say. “Voting should be a privilege, not a right,” one even said. There was a lot of huffing and puffing on both sides.
Now, it’s dead. The Commonwealth Court ruled against it, and our fine Governor Corbett has finally said he’ll no longer fight to get it reinstated.
On Tuesday in the nation’s capital the CEO of General Motors testified about a dangerous vehicle defect that apparently has resulted in at least 13 deaths. GM has issued a recall on vehicles due to
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.