internet

Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism, employing technology to encourage debate and feature user-generated content. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.

All of this suggests that the internet may benefit liberals more often than conservatives -- at least for now.

The different approaches of the top two political blogs may illustrate the correlation between ideology and online strategy.

Is it really a marketplace when 78% of potential customers have only 2 options, and only 4% of customers have 3 or more?  How can internet providers call their market competitive in the face of such statistics and not be called out on it?  Go net neutrality!

http://www.broadband.gov/plan/4-broadband-competition-and-innovation-pol...

"The one constant is its growing importance. Censorship used to be the sleepy province of the Communist Party’s central propaganda department, whose main task was to tell editors what and what not to print or broadcast. In the new networked China, censorship is a major growth industry, overseen — and fought over — by no fewer than 14 government ministries.

Yet another disgrace of the Bush administration was the sorry state they allowed national internet access to wallow in. Coming off the tech boom you'd think they would have learned the importance of the internet for our economy.  With the abiilty to connect the GOP base to new opportunities for education, employment, government transparency (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/arts/television/16cspan.html), and healthcare, it seems like it'd be a no-brainer for them to hook it up... oh yeah...

The telecom industry feels a disturbance in the force:

"FCC line-sharing policy since 2002 has taken the United States off track when it comes to broadband deployment. The agency should reverse course and require AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and the other big ISPs to open their networks to smaller providers of residential broadband service at regulated wholesale rates. This will foster competition, lower prices, and more innovative broadband offerings across the country, as it has elsewhere."