Verizon's Latest Censorship Plan Follows a Familiar Pattern

If the past is prologue, here’s what we can expect if Verizon is allowed to become the Internet’s editor-in-chief. 

On Tuesday, Daily Dot reported that Verizon is attempting to buy its way into the news cycle by creating a tech-news site, SugarString.com, to compete with the likes of Wired and The Verge.

But there's a twist: According to emails from the site's editors, SugarString will ban reporters from writing any stories about Net Neutrality or U.S. surveillance programs.

The site is now staffing up -- hiring editors and reporters to produce stories that Verizon hopes will appeal to mainstream audiences. In an email to a prospective reporter, SugarString Editor Cole Stryker wrote that the ban on coverage of Net Neutrality and spying "is pretty much it as far as content restrictions go. The upside is that we have a big budget to pay people well, make video documentaries and other fun shit."

Photographing 'On the Road'

Timothy Karr. New Jersey Meadowlands, 2014.

Ever since I first picked up a camera I have photographed from the windows of moving cars. There’s something that is both familiar and foreign about the passing scenery. This push-and-pull between the permanent and the fleeting is inherently photographic while also being rooted in an art history of making landscapes.

My road pictures usually occur as I’m shuttling one of my daughters to or from New Jersey regional soccer games — an activity that has become a cliché of suburban life in America. Yet being “on the road” has more romantic associations with the era of Kerouac and Kesey. I often like to imagine myself as suspended between these two worlds.

Why Phone and Cable Companies Want to Kill the Internet’s Most Democratic Right

Originally published by PBS MediaShift

Net Neutrality — the principle that protects Internet users’ free speech rights — is censorship.

Did you get that? You did if you happened to be reading the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. Former Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell recently wrote a screed claiming that Net neutrality supporters have taken a turn “toward undermining free speech.”

And McDowell is not alone. Since the FCC announced its plan to make a new ruling regarding the open Internet, Washington has been overrun with phone and cable lobbyists whose sole mission is to convince the agency that real Net Neutrality rules are downright un-American.