Dear Chairman Genachowski and Commissioners Copps, McDowell, Clyburn, and Baker:
My name is Eric Susch. I have been producing an internet video show called Let’s Knit2gether for over four years now.
I’m the little guy, the small business person who always gets mentioned in the abstract but who rarely gets a chance to speak for himself directly. I, and many others like me, are trying to pioneer a new form of video entertainment and information exchange, outside the traditional forms of movies and television that are dominated by large conglomerates. This new cottage industry needs Net Neutrality desperately to survive. We’re in direct competition with large companies like Comcast Cable and Time-Warner just as blogs were in competition with newspapers and magazines six or seven years ago. Because the net was “neutral” back then, blogs (for good or bad) were able to broaden the scope of the marketplace and bring information and opinion to the public at large that the big media news organizations weren’t. That’s what we are doing in the video space. We are creating video content that big companies don’t want to take a risk on and we’re delivering that content to millions of viewers who thank us every day for providing something new and different. Please don’t shut down this new innovative marketplace by giving those who control the wires of the internet the power to discriminate against certain data. The consumer’s and the producers should decide what content is readily available, not the middle-men who control the wires.
I share the concerns that Union Square Ventures has outlined on its blog:
http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/12/an-applications-agnostic-approach.php
I urge you to work together in the coming weeks to improve this proposal along the lines described in their post. I support your effort to create an application-agnostic regulatory framework for the Internet.
Sincerely,
Eric Susch