JMS

(Via Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins:

Steve Schultze, xPRXr (former PRX project director) now at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, has a good guest post on Henry Jenkin’s blog on “Broadband and the Public Interest“:

Since the Radio Act of 1927, our communications regulation has included language invoking the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” The “public interest” is a notoriously but necessarily slippery phrase. Over time, the implementation of the concept has eroded into little more than lame public service announcements and FCC indecency fines. The groundswell of support for net neutrality represents a remarkably successful invocation of the public interest in policy debate. It is particularly interesting because it draws its power from a broad-based grassroots coalition that has successfully stood up to heavily backed lobbyists and astroturf campaigns from the major telecommunications companies.

Click to read the full piece on Jenkin’s blog.