Issue Position: Preserving Online Freedoms

Issue Position

Susan Heitzman sees the ability to use the Internet constructively for progress as one of our top priorities. It interconnects us financially, politically, culturally, and geographically - providing us with the key means to promote personal and business collaboration with one another.

Online universal access must be guaranteed as both a basic human right and as the new free speech issue of our time. The Internet is becoming as important to our citizens as any other public utility service.

Susan believes that online public information network will be the most useful and beneficial to society, as a whole, when net neutrality is in full effect.

Net neutrality is the principle by which all content, sites, and platforms are accorded equal quality standards of performance and access. It would follow that urban and rural Internet subscribers could obtain equal access to high-quality Internet services.

Net neutrality preserves the online freedoms of both content providers and consumers. Our democracy is not only subject to forms of censorship by our government, but it is just as vulnerable to being controlled by those same corporations and special interests that already have undue influence over our political process.

Corporations providing Internet access should not use their power and influence to discriminate against particular websites. They should never selectively raise costs and restrictions; nor should they adopt policies to reduce a website's speed or availability to consumers. This is a form of censorship, and it can arbitrarily destroy someone's business - and ultimately the free enterprise system.

Internet Service Providers remain a threat to consumers. Virtual monopolies exist all over the country, and many rural consumers suffer very substantial hardships in obtaining affordable quality Internet service. Telecom companies seek to remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services.

Internet Service Providers potentially control our access to all online information. They have the ability to keep us from knowing the truth about who runs our country, and which individuals and organizations are acting collectively to endanger our democracy. Our nation's founders understood the necessity for safeguards; however, the government they constructed with so much care is now being systematically undermined.

Congressional oversight of governmental affairs was to be a cornerstone of representative democracy; however, the interests of the American people are not always the primary consideration for our legislators anymore. Government accountability is also based upon a free press, so the journalist - or the citizen journalist - must be guaranteed full access to contributing to the public discourse via the Internet.

Net neutrality can keep knowledgeable individuals from being rendered silent or from disappearing off the Internet. We must fully ensure that the rights of all news source providers and activists remain intact, so that the American people can know the truth for themselves.

The dire risk that censorship poses to our democracy - be it through the government, or through corporations and special interests - must never be underestimated. Nor should we continue to tolerate a political process that is so destructive to our democratic principles, since many of us were once so proud of what America represented.

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