In this attached news article it has been reported that Verizon’s new tech blog Sugarstring does not allow any content related to net neutrality or Internet spying. This topic was not worth a whole blog, but as someone who writes a daily industry blog I couldn’t let it pass unmentioned. So I guess this is a second supplemental blog for today.
There are a wide range of viewpoints and sources of information on the web. But this article points out that when you choose a major corporation as a news source that whatever you read there is going to be filtered through their corporate point of view. I’m not even sure that you can call what Verizon is doing censorship. I look at it more like they are producing a blog that is passed through a public relations filter. They are entitled to do that, but readers of that blog ought to always remember their bias.
The publisher of the Verizon blog admits that he is not allowed to touch these two specific topics, and you know in the future there will be other topics. But what he doesn’t say is that his blog is certainly never going to be critical of Verizon.
There is a lot to like about Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and every big telecom company. And when praise is due I don’t hesitate to praise them. But a lot of the problems we have with broadband in the country falls directly onto these same companies, almost by definition. and so you have seen me criticize them often in my blogs.
I don’t hold myself out as any special beacon of truth, but what this blog and other independent blogs try to do is to look fairly at the hundreds of issues facing our industry. I can’t say that I look at issue without bias because I know that my own bias is a strong attitude that our country ought to do better with broadband We can afford to do it right. So you often hear my frustration when I see large companies or the FCC acting in ways that create barriers to broadband.
But one thing I will never do is to shy away from any specific topic. You may not always agree with what I write about, but I have enough daily followers to know that I must be giving people something to think about – and that is my only real goal with this blog. I try to shine the light on topics that my audience of small carriers find of interest.