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Net neutrality sounds wonky and technical but is actually quite simple. It would keep the Internet as it has always been - cable and phone companies would remain mere gateways to all sites, rather than gatekeepers determining where users can go and what innovators can offer them.
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Google (and Bing and Yahoo!) don't 'owe' any company traffic. If a company has to spend more on advertising on Google, in addition to investing in search-engine-optimization, that is not a violation of any law.
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The current FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, is highly regarded, but some distrust him because he is the former head lobbyist of both the cable and wireless phone industries. He's also made some statements suggesting he doesn't understand or opposes network neutrality.
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In the post-industrial economy, ideas and great minds often provide far greater return on investment than any other resources or capital investments.
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Before the Internet, we were in a different sort of dark age. We had to wait to hear news on TV at night or in print the next day. We had to go to record stores to find new music. Cocktail party debates couldn't be settled on the spot.
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Courts are supposed to interpret laws to avoid 'absurd results' and to avoid constitutional problems - such as infringing on the free speech rights of Americans.
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From search and books to online TV and operating systems, antitrust affects our daily digital lives in more ways than we think.
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Net neutrality is the right thing for our democracy, economy, and global competitiveness. And Americans support an open Internet.
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The FCC should obviously not propose bad rules that will be struck down; it should propose good rules that will be upheld.
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The Supreme Court has crafted doctrines such as 'fair use,' which permits copying materials for criticism, parody, and transformative uses, and has ruled that abstract ideas are not subject to copyright, because courts will not punish people for merely using an abstract concept in speech.
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Broadband companies can have great success offering access to the unfettered Internet.
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Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Tumblr, YouTube, Reddit, WordPress, and Facebook aren't responsible for the copyright infringement of each of their millions of users, so long as they take down specific posts, videos, or images when notified by copyright holders. But copyright holders thought that wasn't good enough.
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Any 'network neutrality' rule should be designed to forbid phone or cable companies from controlling the Internet.
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Without network neutrality, cable and phone companies could stifle innovation.
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Over the course of a year - from January 2014 to March 2015 - millions of Americans, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of policymakers weighed in at the Federal Communications Commission in favor of net neutrality.
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Much of my work strikes me as pretty unified: as a lawyer, working in several areas, I have thought about how to promote freedom of speech broadly for everyone.
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Without the ability to criticize unjust laws in powerful symbolic ways, we can't change them. And the point of a democracy is that people should be able to convince other people to change a law.
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Free speech has remained a quintessential American ideal, even as our society has moved from the ink quill to the touch screen.
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Civil disobedience has almost always been about expression. Generally, it's nonviolent, as defined by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.
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'Negative liberty' is a political science term meaning a liberty from government action. It is not a liberty to anything - like the liberty to meaningfully contribute to public debate or to have ample spaces for speech.
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Almost 85 percent of the Latin American market is subject to net neutrality rules, and the European Parliament already favors strong ones.
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The first-sale doctrine reflects basic common sense - and follows from the logic of treating copyrights and other 'intellectual property' with no more protection than regular property.
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Internet users should be able to choose where to go online and which applications to use. Comcast, say, shouldn't be allowed to block Skype just because it could siphon the communications giant's telephone business.
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The FCC has made it clear it would punish a cable or phone company for deviating from providing 'neutral' access.