Virtual Freedom Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age [Hardcover]

Communications giants like Google, Comcast, and AT&T enjoy increasingly unchecked control over speech. As providers of broadband access and Internet search engines, they can control online expression. Their online content restrictionsfrom obstructing e-mail to censoring cablecastsare considered legal because of recent changes in free speech law.In this book, Dawn Nunziato criticizes recent changes in free speech law in which only the government need refrain from censoring speech, while companies are permitted to self-regulate. By enabling Internet providers to exercise control over content, the Supreme Court and the FCC have failed to protect the public's right to access a broad diversity of content. Nunziato argues that regulation is necessary to ensure the free flow of information and to render the First Amendment meaningful in the twenty-first century. This book offers an urgent call to action, recommending immediate steps to preserve our free speech rights online. In her book,Virtual Freedom,Nunziato predicts that if the High Court does not embrace what she calls an 'affirmative' concept of free speech, requiring powerful private conduits of speech such as Internet service providers (ISPs) to facilitate individual communication, the Internet, as we have known it, will cease to exist . . .Virtual Freedomis a provocative book that could not be timelier. Nunziato . . . provides a well-written, insightful work that discusses private censorship of online communication and that proffers wise solutions designed to protect free speech in the Internet age. InVirtual Freedom, Dawn Nunziato takes a fresh and insightful look at the state of free speech on the Internet. Her book chronicles some alarming examples of censorship on the Internet, and the surprise the book reveals is that the source of the censorship is not the government but the Internet's dominant private players. This valuable work not only illustrates the free speech problems that besl³c