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Would Google-Verizon Deal Hurt Innovation and Independent Voices?

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SUSAN CRAWFORD
Available for a limited number of interviews, Crawford is former special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy (2009). She now teaches at the Cardozo Law School and is a visiting researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. She is quoted in Time Magazine: “It’s the next Google in a garage in Palo Alto that will be hurt by this [the planned Google-Verizon deal]. … This allows for the cable-ization of an Internet access provider.”
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LAURA FLANDERS
Flanders is founder and host of GRITtv, a independent daily program distributed via the internet and on Free Speech TV (Dish Network and DirecTV.) She said today: “We learned years ago that separate’s not equal. While Google/Verizon present their deal as a re-commitment to equal treatment, in fact, the purported equality would exist only in a fast expiring hard-wired universe. An enormous opt-out would permit money to control traffic in the wireless Internet world. It’s tantamount to telling independent producers we are free to communicate and do business — but only by tin-can on a mobile planet.”
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JACK WALSH
Walsh is co-director of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. He said today: “The most crucial thing is that the Internet remain free and open. The FCC should see broadband as part of telecommunications policy; there needs to be a regulatory body to ensure that certain places on the Internet do not get preferential treatment so many voices can be heard. In NAMAC’s recently completed national poll, over 400 public media organizations told us that the web is now their number one way of reaching the public.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167