Some excerpts from our comments to the FCC asking it to protect the public interest in an open and diverse Internet by implementing significant Net Neutrality protections on the broadband Internet. Our full Comments, with attachments, are linked below.

Writers, directors, producers, performers, musicians, and other talented professionals in the literary and entertainment arts give life to our nation’s popular and literary arts -- educating the public, enriching the culture, and helping safeguard our democracy.

But our ability to create and produce our best work, and then distribute that work to the American public, has often been restricted by lack of access to the means of distribution. Film and television production and distribution are tremendously expensive, and usually tightly controlled by a handful of media conglomerates.

In conjunction with technological advances in video production, the broadband Internet promises to dramatically reduce the cost of production and distribution of video content. Creative media artists view these changes as a tremendously exciting opportunity to directly reach their audience – the American people – with the best content they can possibly create.

Yet that exciting opportunity may not come to pass if the cable and telephone companies that overwhelmingly dominate the market for broadband distribution can pick and choose who will get distribution over their “pipes” based on discriminatory fees for so-called “priority” service.

Such a system would essentially turn these broadband service providers into gatekeepers able to powerfully influence or manipulate artistic content, pick and choose which creative artists get broadband distribution, the quality of that distribution, and the audience the artists can reach – not unlike the oligopolistic broadcast and cable television distribution system. Such a closed, crabbed broadband Internet would not be in the interests of creative media artists or their audience – the American public. Artists must have the freedom to distribute their works over the broadband Internet, and the American public must have the freedom to choose from among those works, rather than have the cable and telephone broadband providers who overwhelmingly control the market for broadband deny those freedoms and make those choices for them.

I enclose an article titled, The Future Internet: Open or Closed? that appeared in Produced By, the monthly magazine of the Producers Guild of America. Other versions of this article have appeared in the Journal of the Caucus of Television Producers, Writers & Directors, and The Independent, the monthly magazine of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. We also recently published a shorter piece on Network Neutrality in Written By, the journal of the Writers Guild of America, west.

In addition, we attach letters from the prestigious Caucus for Television Producers, Writers & Directors to FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps and to legislators on Capitol Hill that stress the importance of Net Neutrality not only to independent producers, writers, and directors of film, television, and video programming, but to the American public.