Free Press’s Ben Scott Faces Down Titans, Regulators in Battle Over Internet Control

[babylonsister]

Net Neutrality’s Quiet Crusader
Free Press’s Ben Scott Faces Down Titans, Regulators in Battle Over Internet Control
By Cecilia Kang


Bearing video cameras, laptops and cellphones, a small army of young activists flooded into a recent federal meeting in protest.



Members of public-interest group Free Press weren’t there to support a presidential candidate or decry global warming. The tech-savvy hundreds came to the Federal Communications Commission’s hearing at Harvard Law School last month to push new rules for the Internet.

For the first time, Congress and the FCC are debating wide-reaching Web regulations and policies that would determine how much control cable and telecommunications companies would have over the Internet. The issue has given rise to a new political constituency raised on text messaging and social networking and relies on e-mail blasts and online video clips in its advocacy.

Although Free Press has generated buzz for its aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics online, its ringleader in Washington is an unlikely crusader. A soft-spoken 30-year-old PhD candidate, Ben Scott has become an operator in multibillion-dollar battles involving corporate titans, regulators and consumers debating policies over who controls the media and the Internet.

“There have been policy moments in the past when the market has been shaped by decisions made in Washington — radio in the 1930s, television in the 1950s and cable in the 1980s. That moment is now for the Internet,” said Scott, who runs a nine-member office.

Working mostly behind the scenes, Scott has been a driving force for “net neutrality,” a concept that in policy terms has come to mean enforcement of open access online, so cable and telecom operators cannot block or delay content that travels over their networks. In a complaint filed at the FCC last November, Scott and his staff called for action against Comcast, which admitted it slowed content over its network involving the BitTorrent file-sharing site.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/28/7935/

[navarth]

1. bless him

may he slay the greedy overlords.

you go Ben.

k & r

[bananas]

2. k&r nt

[babylonsister]

3. .