FCC Chairman Makes His Case for Free, Porn-Free Internet

Kevin Martin, chairman of Federal Communications Commission, is doing his best to sell his free, porn-free internet dream. The plan is – if you were on an intergalactic voyage all this while - to auction AWS-3 spectrum to a company willing to provide nationwide wireless broadband internet for free and sans pornographic content. “More and more people expect and demand to have access to the Internet and new wireless technologies,” Martin apprised USA Today about the increasingly insatiable thirst for broadband.

He rests his case on the absolute necessity of broadband and compares it to copper lines as the most prominent means of communication. His plan hasn’t gone down well with T-Mobile which believes that wireless services in the AWS-3 spectrum will interfere with its own services in the AWS-1 range. But Martin tried to allay such fears by telling USA Today that engineers are busy finding a solution.

There is certainly a case for free wireless broadband if one considers the abject rate of broadband penetration in the U.S with only 38% of rural America enjoying broadband, according to a report by Communications Workers of America. Furthermore, the percentage of broadband homes is only 25% amongst households with annual incomes of $20,000 or below.

What the MPC Readers Are Saying: But T-Mobile is not the only one frowning. Many people, including a few MPC readers, don’t like the porn-free part of the proposal. “I would rather see nationwide free internet fail completely than to see our government actively "filtering" the net. Leave net censorship to the Chinese,” wrote a charged up MPC reader; and “porn drives innovation,” according to another.

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