In response to my recent post on Wikileaks people posed the question of what will happen if the government just "pulls the plug" on the Internet. My thought at the time was that this was impractical in that pulling the plug on the free flow of information will disrupt the processes of doing business and would be unacceptable. Countries like China or Iraq are able to suppress specific Internet content with only limited success by shutting down computer servers located on their soil. Not only does this limit the ability of these countries to fully participate in a free and open, therefore creative and innovative global economy.

However, in the context of the ongoing overthrow of global society and of capitalism itself by multinational corporations my optimism may have been naive. The thrust of this takeover is not to encourage creativity and innovation, which is supposedly the highest virtue of a free and open capitalist economy, but to discourage competition through the reshaping of public regulations to favor monopolies.

The Internet has functioned for the brief time it has been in existence as the counterforce to total corporate control of the flow of information and content between people and business. The threat to all of this is that the Internet will go the way of radio and television in the past. While both of these mediums in their infancy promised new opportunities for public dialogue, they were both quickly co-opted by the forces of greed and power and reduced to one-way, top-down vehicles where the freedom of choice is largely an illusion fostered by a proliferation of networks carrying essentially the same content and owned by a very small number of companies. The actions of companies like Comcast and Verizon and AT&T to influence the rulings by the Federal Communications Commission on issues of Net Neutrality will take the Internet in the same direction and result in corporate control of both the flow and content of information. 

On monday Senator Al Franken addressed his concerns about this impending takeover on the Senate floor: