[Ecommerce] Creative Voices: Net Neutrality Vital to Creative Artists AND American Public, CV Tells FCC

[Manon Ress]

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Net Neutrality Vital to Creative Artists AND American Public, CV
Tells FCC
July 16, 2007
Some excerpts from our comments to the FCC asking it to protect the
public interest in an open and diverse Internet by implementing
significant Net Neutrality protections on the broadband Internet. Our
full Comments, with attachments, are linked below.

Writers, directors, producers, performers, musicians, and other
talented professionals in the literary and entertainment arts give
life to our nation=92s popular and literary arts -- educating the
public, enriching the culture, and helping safeguard our democracy.

But our ability to create and produce our best work, and then
distribute that work to the American public, has often been
restricted by lack of access to the means of distribution. Film and
television production and distribution are tremendously expensive,
and usually tightly controlled by a handful of media conglomerates.

In conjunction with technological advances in video production, the
broadband Internet promises to dramatically reduce the cost of
production and distribution of video content. Creative media artists
view these changes as a tremendously exciting opportunity to directly
reach their audience =96 the American people =96 with the best content
they can possibly create.

Yet that exciting opportunity may not come to pass if the cable and
telephone companies that overwhelmingly dominate the market for
broadband distribution can pick and choose who will get distribution
over their =93pipes=94 based on discriminatory fees for so-called
=93priority=94 service.

Such a system would essentially turn these broadband service
providers into gatekeepers able to powerfully influence or manipulate
artistic content, pick and choose which creative artists get
broadband distribution, the quality of that distribution, and the
audience the artists can reach =96 not unlike the oligopolistic
broadcast and cable television distribution system. Such a closed,
crabbed broadband Internet would not be in the interests of creative
media artists or their audience =96 the American public. Artists must
have the freedom to distribute their works over the broadband
Internet, and the American public must have the freedom to choose
from among those works, rather than have the cable and telephone
broadband providers who overwhelmingly control the market for
broadband deny those freedoms and make those choices for them.

I enclose an article titled, The Future Internet: Open or Closed?
that appeared in Produced By, the monthly magazine of the Producers
Guild of America. Other versions of this article have appeared in the
Journal of the Caucus of Television Producers, Writers & Directors,
and The Independent, the monthly magazine of the Association of
Independent Video and Filmmakers. We also recently published a
shorter piece on Network Neutrality in Written By, the journal of the
Writers Guild of America, west.

In addition, we attach letters from the prestigious Caucus for
Television Producers, Writers & Directors to FCC Commissioner Michael
J. Copps and to legislators on Capitol Hill that stress the
importance of Net Neutrality not only to independent producers,
writers, and directors of film, television, and video programming,
but to the American public.

Additional Materials
# CV Comments to FCC on Net Neutrality, July 16, 2007 (211.52KB)

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Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@keionline.org,

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