From a semiotic perspective, the word “freedom” may be the most slippery of all signifiers. Throughout the history of the American media, it has been most commonly and strategically utilized by politicians as a dangerous simulacrum: conjuring up romantic images of flag-waving, battle-waging, apple pie patriotism, while using the powerful reassurance of these images to mask ideologies to which it bears no reference. Thus, pre-emptive, quasi-imperialist invasions become vague “fights for freedom,” and rampant and irresponsible, neoliberal corporatism becomes enveloped in the warm-and-fuzzy, utopian tone of the “free market.”     

This tactic is far from new, but each time it rears its ugly head, the sheer sneakiness of all of it never fails to astonish me. The latest manifestation is, of course, John McCain’s “Internet Freedom Act” – an attack on Web 2.0 participatory culture and all it has done for media democracy. Despite the egalitarian connotation, try not be fooled: it’s not freedom for you or me, but for big media, and its specific focus is taking down net-neutrality.

Although the concept deserves a far more complex discussion than I can give here, net-neutrality can basically be summed up as a set of regulations put in place by the FCC to ensure that bandwidth distribution and consequent access to all sites on the web is equal. Under his “Internet Freedom Act,” McCain wants to kill net-neutrality by completely de-regulating how much bandwidth is allocated to each website. In the faux-neutral spirit of the “free market,” he thinks download time should be based on purchasing power. Therefore, in his model, sites owned by big corporations would download much faster, while little, blogger sites owned by the Average Joe or Josephine would take something like 10 minutes to come across.

Unfortunately, we have seen this same logic at play just 15 years ago within the entertainment industry, with television as the battleground. Just as the FCC’s Fin-Syn (Financial and Syndication) rules were instated in 1970 to curb the power of the “Big Three” networks (NBC, ABC, CBS) and their monopoly on the public airwaves, they were then repealed in 1996, allowing media corporations to merge into the international, vertically integrated giants they are today. True, many more cable channels exist on contemporary TV, but these channels are still owned by a few, massive corporations (much bigger than the Big Three). The case of net-neutrality and the internet may be even more dire: corporate site dominance may make smaller sites inconvenient to access, decreasing the opportunity for the bottom-up visibility that had made the internet unique.  

Do we really want a repeat of this history on the internet, which, unlike TV, was built on the shoulders of little gals and guys? You may not miss the opportunity to visit asinine fan blogs on Paris Hilton, but what will come of the citizen journalist and grassroots politics with the death of net-neutrality? When trying to wade through all the bs “freedom,” I’d suggest subjecting yourself to a simple, one question, litmus test: whose freedom are we advocating for, and whose freedom comes as an expense?