Maven Mapper's

Michael Copps was a little dumb founded at the no show of the major ISPs at this weeks Net Neutrality hearing.  The ISPs have been fighting to lock down the internet and force people to pay for access to premium knowledge and information as the carriers deem fit.  We're not talking about websites making you pay for their content, we're talking about your broadband provider making you pay before you even get to those websites.

Well, those carriers were not able to make the debate and defend their attempts to chain the internet and suck more money out of consumers.

Copps followed Martin's apologia, all fire and brimstone. "Let's look at it from an inventor's perspective," Copps explained. Will the broadband pipes for which they develop applications be open to their ideas? "Inventors and creators need to know, up-front, that they have the right to innovate without going on bended knee to seek permission from a few who have amassed too much control in their own hands," he said.

The time has come, Copps declared, to beef up the FCC's 2005 Internet Policy Statement with an "enforceable principle of non-discrimination." Something that makes it clear that "we will not tolerate unreasonable discrimination by network operators," bolstered by enforcement rules "to make sure that anyone with other ideas isn't going to get away with them."

Big ISPs a no show at second FCC net neutrality hearing

I have no sympathy here for the ISPs.  They have created a technology like radio in its day that has given people access to a new plane of existence.  Back then it was radio waves or spectrum, today it is the mythical place known as the ether, but that place is shared in ownership by people all around the world and no company can harness it and claim ownership or prevent people from accessing it based on how much money they do or do not pay for the content.

The concept seems extra ludicrous as the economy starts to turn into a heavy recession with hints of the same problems that sparks depressions.  The concepts of charging people more when they can barely fill up their gas tanks or pay their mortgages, while corporate CEO's chuck around multi million dollar stock options like they were a Rolex President sales trophy just grates at the nerves.