Legal Niches

Digital Education Coalition Offers FCC Net Neutrality Comments

By pete_gallagher

The Digital Education Coalition, comprised of The Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA), The International Game Developers Association (IGDA), the Media Education Lab at Temple University and the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), has offered comments to the Federal Communications Commission in favor of Net Neutrality.

The document (PDF here) notes why net neutrality is important to coalition members:

The digital education community needs access to a wide variety of online content, which broadband service providers are currently able to block or filter. Further, members of the community need to transmit and access content such as videos, speeches and photos, which require large amounts of bandwidth. The only way to protect educational interests online is to prohibit content-based discrimination.

The group also seeks to persuade the FCC to require internet service providers to act more transparently and to disclose network management practices on their websites.

Members of the digital education community currently have limited access to the network management practices of service providers. Yet, this information is needed to help educators to plan their curricula, enable media literacy educators to teach about network transmissions and assist game developers in the creation of innovative teaching tools.

Disclosure: GamePolitics is a publication of the ECA.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on January 15, 2010 (boomark / email).