On Thursday February 4, the Senate held hearings on the potential merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. During the hearings Senator Al Franken warned that we should be nervous about the companies that own our media and we should be particularly nervous when one company owns both the means to produce programs and the pipes that deliver those same programs. Senator Franken later went on to detail his dealings with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts on the merger, depicting either extreme dishonesty or incompetence.

In a Youtube video of the senate hearing Franken explains:

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On Friday, the Media and Democracy Coalition stood with SEIU, the Teamsters, UFCW, Healthcare for America Now, small business owners, Greenpeace, PennEnvironment, AFSCME, Change to Win, the Sierra Club, and many other groups in denouncing the regressive policies of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at its meeting in Philadelphia.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been fighting healthcare reform, climate change legislation, and President Obama's attempt to guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of expression online. I spoke of the growing threat from the giant corporations like Comcast that control the Internet to our freedom of speech online, and the need to make net neutrality the law.

Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, of Erie.

This is almost impossible to believe - but it's actually true.

About a month ago, the Obama administration announced its intent to write policy that would protect, by law, the freedom that has allowed the Internet to grow and flourish.

It's no joke that such protection is needed. Repression of the Internet by the corporations that control it has already started.

Last month, Apple told a healthcare reform group that they wouldn't carry a healthcare reform app on their AT&T network for 30 million iPhones because it was "politically charged"...

...two years ago, it was Verizon refusing to transmit text messages from NARAL Pro-choice America.