By David Meyer – Europe’s digital agenda chief has criticized the Netherlands for legislating to protect net neutrality, saying it is too early for lawmakers to take sides on the issue.
“I regret very much that the Netherlands seems to be moving unilaterally on this issue. We must act on the basis of facts, not passion; acting quickly and without reflection can be counterproductive,” Neelie Kroes, herself a Dutch politician, said at a Brussels summit with network operators.
Kroes’s antipathy to the Dutch net-neutrality laws stands in contrast with what she herself said in January 2010, when she was about to become the EU’s digital agenda commissioner. more> http://is.gd/8b3zfe
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On the subject of net neutrality, Bob Gibson, Executive Director of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, recently said: “It’s a debate that is going on in the Congress, and it’s really: Is the Internet going to be something that everyone has free and open access to, or, is it going to be something that is sort of controlled? What we don’t need is a lot of government control in the businesses of the internet. I think what we need is more of what we have with National Public Radio, which is a really true and balanced set of reporting that unfortunately has become politicized. What we are seeing is a shift from “anything goes” on the Internet to a shift where major corporations are shaping the news outlets and buying up more and more of the news outlets and putting them under corporate control and one set of a small number of hands…. We need freeware, we need shareware, and we need open access. People need to be able to trust sources that they can find on the internet, rather than have them controlled in a small number of hands or by the government.” (Gibson appeared on the Charlottesville, VA, politics interview program Politics Matters with host and producer Jan Madeleine Paynter discussing journalism http://bit.ly/pm-gibson)