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Net-neutrality activists express themselves with poems
Verse is one way net-neutrality activists expressed themselves at a public hearing co-hosted Tuesday night by Free Press.
The event in New Mexico, which featured Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps, drew activists who read poems aloud.
"And if you saw my Comcast bill you’d see, it’s as reasonable as a robbery," slam poet Hakim Bellamy intoned in his piece.
The full poem is after the jump.
There is nothing private about the Internet
So why start now?
Half the people in this room
e-RSVP’d to come see you
And there’s another room full of us
Webstreaming this right now at they house
And we’re not going to let this be framed
Into cyber-bullying and Facebook accounts
We’re talking about a third of the US population
That is already suffocating without it
It’s a natural resource not an outlet
Like water versus water skiing
Not a luxury we can live without when half state and federal forms
Must be electronically filled out
But you CAN live without the skis
This is prologue to the tale of two nations
I say, no borders means no warfare
As opposed to the occupation of information
Some speculate that an educated electorate is not desired
That’s how the “in power” stay empowered
Instead of trying to three-fifths our intellectual property
They aught to respect the government’s proprietary knowledge
Their ARPANET became Telnet in 1975
After Kleinrock’s packet switch technology and hierarchical routing
And now the hierarchy is pouting
We can’t let’em buy the rug right under from out of US
The last the industry won and we lost
Was right around the Communications Act 1934
And all they wanted back then
Was 25% of the facilities for public interest
And all we want now is the FCC to stand by us and its mission:
“to regulate interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio
so as to make available,
So far as possible, to every citizen of our country
A rapid, efficient, nationwide and worldwide wire
And radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges…”
And if you saw my Comcast bill you’d see
It’s as reasonable as a robbery…
Half the applications for jobs already require a PC or a Mac
And half the hoods and reservations don’t even have that
Instead of tying us together, it’ll be dividing us by class
And in this desert
Where the middle class has dried up all its ladders
Now, we’re even running out of electronic bootstraps.
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