The National Council on Negro Women expressed their support for AT&T’s bid to purchase T-Mobile USA. The civil rights group expressed that it was important that underserved minority communities get online access to healthcare, education, and career resources. Should we be denied access to these services because of capacity issues? Opponents of the transaction seem to think so.

Were it not for groups like the National Council on Negro Women, there would be no one to vigorously address the issue of the digital divide. The only thing I hear from Sprint, Free Press, and Public Knowledge is the usual paranoid ranting of why AT&T being big is supposed to be bad for everyone.

Opponents never make a case for why allowing T-Mobile USA to eventually go out of business would be good for solving the digital divide issue. They never argue why denying the purchase will help make spectrum available in rural or underserved urban areas.

Groups like the National Council on Negro Women are properly tying the social justice arguments with the economic arguments that support the acquisition. Public Knowledge, on the other hand, would rather scare people into believing that there is going to be some horrific change from the current market structure to something so utterly gruesome that it will be Armageddon for consumers.

What are we going to see after the sale is closed? The very same market structure that exists today; an oligopoly.

So kudos to the National Council on Negro Women for seeing past the smoke and mirrors of the opponents’ arguments.

Critics of the proposed Comcast and NBC Universal joint venture have been making the argument that such an arrangement, between a large distributor of video programming and other content and a large content provider, would dampen our ability to fully participate in our great democracy.

I agree that the public should remain suspect of the media and its influence on our ability to keep government accountable. The traditional and major news sources also spend too much time being duplicative. ABC gives me the same old information that CBS gives me. I mean, how many times do I have to hear that the captain of the Enterprise got busted or that John Boehner is a cry baby. The information they provide does not appear very diverse.

And yes, there are a small number of large news organizations that appear to have a lock on the voices being heard on the airwaves. The alphabet soup includes CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CNBC, and Bloomberg.

But even with an apparent dearth of news outlets, am I ready to throw in the towel on democracy? Of course not.

There is no lack of information. There is a dearth of citizen accountability for going after information. We choose and find excuses for being spoon-fed. If we can’t get the news and a Katie Couric smile in 24 minutes, we move on to Facebook and end up spending more than 24 minutes on-line. Between the libraries of our state universities and our public libraries, we have access to lots of information about how our government runs.

With the information that we glean from alternative sources, we can resort to the tried and true methods of message transmission, letter writing, phone calls, and personal visits, to influence the policy decisions of our representatives. The hang-up that critics like Free Press have is really not with democracy. It’s with the use of one medium, namely the Internet, by content providers.

The Internet is sexy, and gets sexier with every new app, blog, and social media network that gets its hooks into it. It’s the fear of “gatekeepers” like Comcast relegating these content providers to the back of the bus and forcing them to pay to play that has critics scared. They could care less about our ability to impact our representative government as long as the pipes on the Internet are clear enough to allow them to send out their messages.

In an information society with access to probably too much information, the real threat to democracy is not whether Comcast will allow me to go to Color of Change’s website. It’s whether Americans will take the time to pursue good information, no matter the source of the content or distribution, and use it.

Just read FCC v. AT&T, 582 F3^rd 490, United States Court of Appeals-3^rd Circuit. The court remanded this case back to the Federal Communications Commission to determine whether disclosure of certain e-mails, names, other documents to the FCC by AT&T would amount to an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

The court held that the personal privacy exemption under the Freedom of Information Act was also applicable to AT&T because corporations were defined as persons under the statute. It appears instead that the FCC would rather the U.S. Supreme Court (see docket no. 09-1279) define once and for all what an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy is and more importantly clarify that FOIA defines corporations as persons.

That’s fine by me. A decision in favor of AT&T would pay dividends for broadband access providers. Even if net neutrality is not codified by statute (which it won’t be), being able to claim that a broadband access provider is exempt from providing requested information to third parties during a law enforcement action is a positive benefit not only to companies but also to their subscribers.

Whenever I log into Facebook and share information with my FB posse, I usually wonder to myself, how much is Facebook making off of my information and insights?

Facebook, MySpace, etc., are all generating income derived from advertisements. Businesses buy ads based on the level of traffic coming to these sites and with over 500 million users that‘s a lot of traffic for Facebook.

Facebook is making money. They make money when I add friends because it means 410 possible sources of traffic. I get “friended” based partially on my profile. My thing is, why can’t I get a piece of that action? Where is my check? I don’t mind giving people access to my information, my content, my property if I can be compensated for it.

Unfortunately, this rational market approach is not even being considered by the privacy police. They would rather institute more privacy laws and regulations rather than recommending that Facebook pay us for appropriating our images and content. Let’s face it. If Americans were concerned about privacy, we wouldn’t be on the Internet much less use social media.

What we should do is implement a market-based mechanism that, through the power of price, would regulate the amount of our information allowed to be provided to third parties. If websites and credit card companies want the information, especially for the purposes of resale, they should buy it. If not, they should be legally liable for its use without permission.

A market based solution to privacy with the courts as arbiter should be explored before pursuing any additional regulations.

My son goes to school approximately five minutes from Dr. Martin Luther King’s gravesite. We live half a block from a street named after another civil rights icon, Ralph David Abernathy. Reverend Al Sharpton’s regional headquarters for his National Action Network is within a couple minutes walking distance from my gate. John Lewis’ 2010 campaign headquarters was literally around the corner.

Living and working so close to the monuments and offices of these civil rights icons always keeps me in a state of reverence when the topic of equal rights, justice, and civil rights comes up.

That’s why it irks me to no end when I hear the far left wing go overboard and sully and misrepresent the meaning of our constitutional rights with another one of their paranoid rants.

Specifically, the Netroots posse argues in a November 12, 2010 Huffington Post blog that Senate bill 3804, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, will be used by the government to censor “broad portions of the Internet.“ If one reads the bill closely, nothing could be further from the truth.

What S.3804 does is prohibit websites from infringing on the copyrights of other content providers. It takes the war against copyright infringement form the copying machine at Kinko’s into cyberspace. As alleged defenders of media and the little-guy content providers, you would think that the Netroots posse would be lining up in support of the legislation.

Instead, they would rather do what the far left hippie fringe enjoys doing: equating constitutional rights and our civil rights icons with criminal activity all in the name of cool.