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C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law and founder of the Center on Internet and Society Lawrence Lessig is interviewed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!. The interview covers a span of different topics, including the recent FCC hearing at Stanford Law School; Comcast and its network shaping; Google and Privacy; Yahoo and China; Creative Commons; and Change Congress. Some select quotations:
"Well, the FCC is confronting the fact, first, that broadband development in America has been wildly inferior, relative to other competitive nations. We’ve got very poor access and service relative to our competitors, and that’s a problem, produced largely by bad policy at the federal level."
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"If the owners of the wires get to muck about with the kinds of content that come across the wires, then they might block competition that’s valuable, both because it’s increasing the diversity of content available and also because it’s enabling new kinds of applications to come onto the network."
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In regards to Google: "And I think the government’s role is always to make sure that the market here continues to preserve the competition that makes sure that you don’t have to trust the competitors; they do the right thing because the market demands it."
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"And if we begin to imagine a world where we trust companies to do good public policy, then we’re fools, because they’ll do good public policy when it makes sense for them from a financial perspective to do it, but when it doesn’t make sense for them from a financial perspective to do it, they won’t."
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"One thing I’ve become convinced about is that our government has been so compromised by this dependency that exists between members of Congress and those who fund their election that there’s a fundamental lack of trust or faith in the public in what our government does."