SAVING THE INTERNET

GREAT article on Net Neutrality ("Broad Bandits," Cover Story) in the Aug. 9-16 Metro Santa Cruz. Many of your readers know that Cruzio, a local Santa Cruz Internet provider, is involved in the Net Neutrality battle. Cruzio is dedicated to providing open and equal Internet access to our community.

Telecommunications giants have been quietly taking control of the Net in the past several years, lobbying lavishly and effectively in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento. These big companies have divisions that provide content (like movies or search engines) as well as access. Likely they'd favor their own content, if given the power. And that would limit what the rest of us can read or publish.

Cruzio prefers to preserve the Internet Provider as a common carrier, allowing others to experiment with new and creative ideas. Utility companies didn't come up with The Web, or Google, or eBay, or MySpace. They probably won't come up with the next brilliant idea, either. Will they let anyone else?

Right now the pressing issue is the Senate decision on Net Neutrality, coming up in September. Want to do something about it? Cruzio maintains a page of Internet issues with plenty of letter-writing and petition-signing resources. It's easy and quick, and will help protect the Internet from near-monopoly control: www.cruzio.com/members/state_of_internet.html.

Peggy Dolgenos, President, Cruzio, The Internet Store, Santa Cruz

KEEPING IT REAL

THANKS TO Richard Koman for writing the article about the attempt to totally commercialize the Internet in a way I could understand.

Clay Olson, Santa Cruz

KEEPING IT FREE

I WAS VERY DISAPPOINTED to see a cigarette advertisement fall out of every copy of Metro Santa Cruz last week. I work at a public health facility where many children and young adults pick up the free newspapers, so it angered me to see young people curiously looking at a heavy cardboard insert advertising a "sample carton offer." In the future, please consider your audience before allowing an advertisement that could potentially addict someone for life to fall onto the ground at every location your papers are distributed. Thank you. Other than that, you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for keeping it free!

Peter Burke, Santa Cruz

FEEL THE FREEDOM

IN THIS SO-CALLED "democracy," I vote to put the callous, anarchist DeCinzo on the back page of Metro Santa Cruz, and This Modern World near the front.

Jim Englert, Boulder Creek

MORAL CONCLUSIONS

AS ISRAEL HURRIEDLY requests the U.S. government to expedite a shipment of cluster bombs, I find Bruce Thompson's comments justifying Israel's murder of innocent Lebanese children disgusting (see last week's article "A City Divided," News&Views, Aug. 9). Thompson says "there's a temptation to make [Lebanese civilians'] suffering the barometer of one's response," but that we should not draw any moral conclusions. So we should not have moral conclusions about the atrocity of over 1,000 Lebanese civilians murdered by Israel? Thompson then patronizes us with the racist propoganda that Israel is defending itself from pathological Arabs with "very large missiles." This is hard to understand, because Israel is the fourth largest military power in the world, far stronger than Hezbollah and Iran, and loaded with an arsenal of military weapons.

But who is the real aggressor? It was Lebanon who suffered an Israeli invasion in 1982, capped off by the massacres of several thousand unarmed Palestinian civilians at the U.N. refugee camps in Sabra and Chatila. That occupation continues to this day. It was the millions of Palestinians who were murdered or forcibly removed from their homes and turned into permanent refugees, and who now live in the world's largest prisons—Gaza and the West Bank. It is Israel who is the invader and occupier, and not the victim. The Lebanese are resisting the invasion and have rallied by Hezbollah, and they have the right to!

Ultimately, however, it is the U.S. that is responsible. The bomb that murdered 28 people in Qana was manufactured in the U.S. However horrifying, the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians and Lebanese does not even match the U.S.' own Imperial barbarism in Iraq and Afghanistan, where two years after the war is "over" 100 people a day die. And without U.S. support, Israel would be unable to play the role of imperial strongman. The U.S. is even considering invading Iran, the only power left in the Middle East that is not under the boot of the U.S. The death and destruction will stop only when imperialist powers are no longer invading and occupying other peoples, which means we in the U.S. must stand up and protest all Imperialism. This is why we say "Troops Out Now!" and "End U.S. Aid to Israel!"

Owen Goodwin, Santa Cruz

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