Down With 'Big Broter'

In response to the first two questions asked in the article, "Big Brother Is Blocking," I would say: Absolutely not, and absolutely not. We all have a mother; we don't need another one. People do not get phone plans with the intention of them being filtered and altered by the phone company. They want to be able to text whoever they want, and they should be able to because they are paying for it. People also do not have the Internet to have slow service forced upon them by the service provider because they consider file-sharing services "bandwidth hogs." Who cares what they think? If someone wants to watch a movie online, I think they should be able to pick whatever file-sharing service they want without the threat of it being slowed down on purpose.

When I first read this article, the first thing I thought of was the controversy surrounding some of the Super Bowl commercials. CBS chose to cut a GoDaddy.com commercial and a commercial for Man Crunch, a dating Web site for gay men. They did, however, choose to keep and run a "Focus on the Family" advertisement that promotes choosing life over having an abortion. One could argue that pulling ads CBS should have pulled all ads that were promoting highly controversial issues, that it wasn't right for them to pull the one on the gay-dating site and leave the pro-life one in. On the other side, some would say that it's up to a network's standards to determine what is suitable to be run on the air and what isn't. In this argument, CBS had every right to keep one and pull the other one.

There are distinct differences between these two controversies, but I thought of the Super Bowl controversy because many would say that CBS is trying to be a "mother" to its viewers, just like Verizon or Comcast. It will be very interesting to see if the FCC does anything to handle these cases and if it has any affect on networks like CBS.