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    Question Buzz Special Request? - Sotomayor Hearings

    Buzz,

    A special request if at all possible. Amongst many questions U.S Senator Al Franken from Minnesota will be asking Judge Sotomayor at her nomination hearings one could be interesting. The State in which Legislators failed in pursuing filtering Internet access on their citizens.

    Senator Al Franken would like Judge Sotomayor's view on "open access to the Internet".

    Her response could be very interesting!

    greek39

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    Buzzy would be happy to honor your request. The LA Times is posting full transcripts of the proceedings. As of 3:00 EST, Franken has yet to speak, but when he does, we'll post his response here.

    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/

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    Hi Greek,

    Here is a segment with Sen. Frankin (D-MI) and Judge Sotomayor covering net neutrality:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMxiMX0QTD0

    A significant portion of this is focused on a case decided in June 2005 referred to as Brand X. For those interested in lots more detail on the case, the ruling can be found at http://www.fcc.gov/ogc/documents/opi...277-062705.pdf.
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    Thank you guys tons of material to read over. Appears Senator Al Franken is suggesting the Internet is the ultimate example of free speech! The Internet stays open and accessible to all.

    greek39

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    Here is the transcript from the LA Times:

    FRANKEN: Right now, people are getting more and more of their information on the Internet. We're getting newspapers and television and blogs and radio. Americans are getting all of it online.

    It plays a central role in our democracy by allowing anyone with a computer connected to the Internet to publish their ideas, their thoughts, their opinions, and reach a worldwide audience of hundreds of millions of people in seconds. This is free speech, and this is essential to our democracy and to democracy. We saw this in Iran not long ago. Now, Judge, you're familiar with the Supreme Court's 2005 Brand X decision, are you?

    SOTOMAYOR: I am.

    FRANKEN: OK. Well, then you know that Brand X deregulated Internet access services, allowing service providers to act as gatekeepers to the Internet, even though the Internet was originally government funded and built on the notion of common carriage and openness. In fact, we've already seen examples of these companies blocking access to the Web and discriminating on certain uses of the Internet. This trend threatens to undermine the greatest engine of free speech and commerce since the printing press.

    Let's say you're living in Duluth, Minnesota, and you only have one Internet service provider. It's a big mega-corporation, and not only are they the only Internet service provider, but they're also a content provider. They provide -- they own newspapers. They own TV networks. They -- or network. They have a movie studio.

    They decide to speed up their own content and slow down other content. The Brand X decision by the Supreme Court allows them to do this. And this isn't just Duluth. It's Moorhead, Minnesota, it's Rochester, Minnesota, it's Youngstown, Ohio. It's Denver. It's San Francisco. And, yes, it's New York.

    This frightening. It's frightening to me and to millions of my constituents or lots of my constituents.

    Internet connections use public resources; the public airwaves, the public rights of way. Doesn't the American public have a compelling First Amendment interest in ensuring that this can't happen and that the Internet stays open and accessible? In other words, that the Internet stays the Internet?

    SOTOMAYOR: Many describe the telephone as a revolutionary invention, and it did change our country dramatically. So did television. And its regulation of television and the rules that would apply to it were considered by Congress, and those regulations have -- because Congress is the policy chooser on how items related to interstate commerce and communications operate.

    And that issue was reviewed by the courts in the context of the policy choices Congress made. There is no question in my mind as a citizen that the Internet has revolutionized communications in the United States. And there's no question that access to that is a question that society is -- that our citizens as well as yourself are concerned about.

    But the role of the court is never to make the policy. It's to wait until Congress acts and then determine what Congress has done in its constitutionality in light of that ruling. Brand X, as I understood it, was a question of which government agency would regulate those providers.
    And the court, looking at Congress' legislation in these two areas, determined that it thought it fit in one box not the other, one agency instead of another.

    FRANKEN: Is this Title 1 and Title 2? Or as I understand it, Title 2 is very -- is subject to a lot of regulation and Title 1 isn't.

    SOTOMAYOR: Exactly. But the question was not so much stronger regulation or not stronger regulation. It was which set of regulations, given Congress' choice, controlled. Obviously, Congress may think that the regulations the court has, in its holding interpreting Congress' intent and that Congress thinks the court got to wrong, we're talking about statutory interpretation and Congress' ability to alter the court's understanding by amending the statute if it chooses.

    This is not to say that I minimize the concerns you express. Access to Internet, given its importance in everything today -- most businesses depend on it. Most individuals find their information. The children in my life virtually live on it now.

    And so its importance implicates a lot of different questions: freedom of speech, freedom with respect to property rights, government regulation. There's just so many issues that get implicated by the Internet that what the court can do is not choose the policy. It just has to go by interpreting each statute and trying to figure out what Congress intends.

    FRANKEN: I understand that. But isn't there a compelling First Amendment right here for people? No matter what Congress does -- and I would urge my colleagues to take this up and write legislation that I would like -- but isn't there a compelling, overriding First Amendment right here for Americans to have access to the Internet?

    SOTOMAYOR: Rights by a court are not looked at as overriding in the sense that I think a citizen and not -- or a citizen would think about it. Should this go first or should a competing right go second?

    Rights are rights. And what the court looks at is how Congress balanced those rights in a particular situation and then judges whether that balance is within constitutional boundaries.

    Calling one more compelling than the other suggests that there's sort of, you know, property interests are less important than First Amendment interests. That's not the comparison a court makes. The comparison a court makes starts with what balance did Congress choose first? And then we'll look at that and see if it's constitutional.

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    So that's what the Twitter trending sotomayor topic all about yesterday. I wasn't interested yesterday since I read updates from twitter just using the trending topics to spam and promote. *sigh*

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    Quote Originally Posted by greek39 View Post
    Thank you guys tons of material to read over. Appears Senator Al Franken is suggesting the Internet is the ultimate example of free speech! The Internet stays open and accessible to all.

    greek39

    What a wild concept - "open and accessible to all."
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