Net neutrality rules sneaked into ’stimulus’ bill

I've been waiting for filters to be mass used on the internet for a while now (many ip's are already using it in some form). At some point I had a feeling they'd get snuck in somehow.
And as much as I know many people proclaim filtering will cut out fanatical sites and paedo sites. Truth be told it won't at all as those people who create those sites will be able to work around it with blocks and all. It probably make it harder to find and prosacute these sites as they become more hidden.
I'm totally against this, things in the open can be tackled, paedophilia has been happening for centuries and nothing was done then, now its being tackled and people are being prosacuted. I dont want my kids to encounter this sort of stuff and theirs far to much porn out there that kids can find, so why not do whats been done for the last few years but with better controls. Give me my own ability to create accounts and filter it myself. I am an adult and can make decisions for myself and my kids.



The House Democrats’ $825 billion legislation released on Thursday was supposedly intended to “stimulate” the economy. Backers claimed that speedy approval was vital because the nation is in “a crisis not seen since the Great Depression” and “the economy is shutting down.”

That’s the rhetoric. But in reality, Democrats are using the 258-page legislation to sneak Net neutrality rules in through the back door.

The so-called stimulus package hands out billions of dollars in grants for broadband and wireless development, primarily in what are called “unserved” and “underserved” areas. The U.S. Department of Commerce is charged with writing checks-with-many-zeros-on-them to eligible recipients, including telecommunications companies, local and state governments, and even construction companies and other businesses that might be interested.

The catch is that the federal largesse comes with Net neutrality strings attached. The Commerce Department must ensure that the recipients “adhere to” the Federal Communications Commission’s 2005 broadband policy statement (PDF)–which the FCC said at the time was advisory and “not enforceable,” and has become the subject of a lawsuit before a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

One interpretation of the “adhere to” requirement is that a company like AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast that takes “stimulus” dollars to deploy broadband in, say, Nebraska must abide by these rules nationwide. (It’s rather like the state of Nebraska demanding that a broadband provider filter out porn nationwide in exchange for a lucrative government contract.)

In addition, recipients must operate broadband and high-speed wireless networks on an “open access basis.” The FCC, soon to be under Democratic control, is charged with deciding what that means. Congress didn’t see fit to include a definition.

The Bush administration has taken a dim view of Internet regulations in the form of Net neutrality rules, warning last year that they could “inefficiently skew investment, delay innovation, and diminish consumer welfare, and there is reason to believe that the kinds of broad marketplace restrictions proposed in the name of ‘neutrality’ would do just that, with respect to the Internet.” A report from the Federal Trade Commission reached the same conclusion in 2007.