No Room To Talk

Comcast is one of the main internet providers in the Washington D.C. region, and it's interesting that in this region of political activism that they would find themselves in hot water.

Comcast hires Symantec to run anti-spam filters on e-mails, and this time their spam filters kept e-mails out from After Downing Street. After Downing Street is a movement described to "Honor our Dead, and Demand the Truth."

On the 3 year anniversary of the Downing Street Memo (mentioned previously here), the activists at After Downing Street were attempting to organize groups of like-minded people across the country. That's where they ran into a little glitch.

For over a week, Comcast via Symantec had filtered out e-mails from After Downing Street by identifying www.afterdowningstreet.org within the e-mail. Most people used it as a line their signature or the subject line.

Both Comcast and Symantec blamed the filtering on spam and said that they had received 46,000 complaints. But they refused to share any of the complaints with the activist group.

If 46,000 people did indeed file complaints against the group, it poses problems for the future of online political organizing.

What happens when a group of 500,000 Democrats complains about an e-mail from the RNC? Does it get blocked? Or what if large groups of Republicans complained about the excessive amounts of e-mails from MoveOn.org?

Political speech needs to be protected, but unfortunately large companies control access to that information in the digital age. We value ourselves as a high-minded society that believes in free speech, but how can we criticize Chinese internet censorship when companies like Comcast are denying access to information?

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Contrary to this article, there are other high speed cable internet providers in D.C. I'm with Starpower.