I wrote this letter tonight because I _want_ to use the other broadband provider in my area, but there isn’t one. Please feel free to take and remix this letter and then send it to your local representatives.

Please consider supporting efforts to convert the nation’s internet infrastructure to a publicly-held utility. The availability of bandwidth to all Americans is too important to be left to the hands of the corporate interests that currently control the nation’s data networks.

As the Internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous in the American experience, the current regulatory structure will continue to fail to address the broadening digital divide between social and economic classes. The corporations who own the bandwidth capacity have financial incentives to use their monopolies to control and manipulate the channels that Americans choose to use to communicate. Open and public control of these channels is vital to ensuring that all Americans have the ability to make their own choices about communication and media consumption.

The broadband sellers are embarking on anti-competitive practices, effectively limiting consumers use of online video, audio, and telephone communications. Analysts claim that the wholesale prices of bandwidth use is somewhere around $3 per 40GB. Time Warner Cable wants to charge as much as $30 per 40GB.

While I would urge you to support net neutrality measures, I suggest that the current implementation of such measures has failed to address the coming storm of tiered internet access. The current “test marketing” of capped and tiered access to the Internet should illustrate that bandwidth providers are hungry to ensure that only the richest have access to the complete, unrestricted Internet.

Tomorrow I’m sending copies to my elected representatives in Madison and Washington. Time Warner’s tiered bandwidth programs are  little more than profit-minded garbage wrapped in a paper thin argument about “quality.” The delayed roll-out of the program is little more than a sneak attack.

Anyway, if I get any responses to my letters, I’ll be sure to let you know.

Dear_Gwen