Net-Roots? Fuggeddaboudit!

Has anybody been following the latest developments in the full, frontal attack on the net-roots?

I have been saying for some several years that the democratizing possibilities of the WorldWideWeb willl prove too great for the hegemons to resist attacking and destroying aas much of it as possible.

The 'Technorati' keep saying that the system is too open, too fluid, too diverse, too pervasive, too robust to be regulated in ways that would threaten the discursive freedom that has evolved in the last 10-15 years.

But it isn't. It is susceptible to corporate domination, in exactly the same way in which ALL the predeeding mass media have been transformed into profit engines serving only the corpoRat interests.

I believe we will look back wistfully upon the Lamont campaign, and maybe even the rest of this year, this campaign cycle--as the high-water mark of the influence of the net-roots.
So much communicative democracy is just too great a challenge to the status quo--which it has cost billions upon billions of dollars, and occupied the untiring efforts of the Public Relations//Advertizing/Propaganda industry for close to a century for the corpoRats to buy and consolidate--to be permitted to persist in its current. anarchic, democratic form.

Lured by huge checks handed out by the country's top lobbyists, members of Congress could soon strike a blow against Internet freedom as they seek to resolve the hot-button controversy over preserving "network neutrality."

The telecommunications reform bill now moving through Congress threatens to be a
major setback for those who hope that digital media can foster a more democratic
society. The bill not only precludes net neutrality safeguards but also eliminates local community oversight of digital communications provided by cable and phone giants. It sets the stage for the privatized, consolidated and unregulated communications system that is at the core of the phone and cable lobbies' political agenda.

In both the House and Senate versions of the bill, Americans are described as "consumers" and "subscribers," not citizens deserving substantial rights when it comes to the creation and distribution of digital media. A handful of companies stand to gain incredible monopoly power from such legislation, especially AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon.

They have already used their political clout in Washington to secure for the phone and cable industries a stunning 98 percent control of the US residential market for high-speed Internet.

So enjoy it while you can.

Money doesn't talk, it fucking bellows...