“Some issues are neither right nor left.” I’d never vote for Marine Le Pen, President of the National Front in France and consider it tragic her party is doing so well. But when she’s right, she’s right. In her vote at the EU and in her statement below, she strongly supports Net Neutrality. Meanwhile, the “socialist” French government waffled on the subject and the “liberal” U.S. Obama regime actively opposed NN at the U.N.
Danny Sepulveda’s State Department insisted that the words “Net Neutrality” be removed from the ITU & WSIS resolutions. I was horrified by this, especially after Net Neutrality was a strong part of the President’s campaign. I said so on the State Department ITAC, where I’m a member and I urge you to also join.
“I believe Barack Obama and the U.S. government continue to support net neutrality, a major plank of Obama’s platform since 2007. So we should have been happy that WSIS + 10 included two references. Instead, our draft strips out both. I asked what was going on on the ITAC call and was told “we believe NN is too controversial” by a corporate lobbyist. Someone tried to change that to the more bureaucratically correct “this isn’t the right place” but that’s obviously not the real issue.
The U.S. is not a credible defender of the open Internet if we keep making decisions like this.