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For Your Files The End of the Internet? by Jeff Chester,
The Nation, posted online on February 1, 2006 The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are
crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and
nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that
would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online. Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants
are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every
move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of
which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone
and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest
pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get
preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on
our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable,
such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or
simply shut out. Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from
content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream
videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription
plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing
"platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of
Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams
or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received. To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable
lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the
nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit
them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private
networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the
Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering
proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Ten
years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996,
telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to
convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a
turbo-charged digital retail machine. The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than
the cable industry about its strategy for the Internet's future. Senior phone
executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the
delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies.
As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed
to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the
cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage
or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!" The phone industry has marshaled its political allies to
help win the freedom to impose this new broadband business model. At a recent
conference held by the Progress
and Freedom Foundation, a think tank funded by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and
other media companies, there was much discussion of a plan for phone companies
to impose fees on a sliding scale, charging content providers different levels
of service. "Price discrimination," noted PFF's resident media expert
Adam Thierer, "drives the market-based capitalist economy." Net Neutrality To ward off the prospect of virtual toll booths on the
information highway, some new media companies and public-interest groups are
calling for new federal policies requiring "network neutrality" on the Internet. Common Cause, Amazon, Google, Free Press, Media Access Project and Consumers Union, among
others, have proposed that broadband providers would be prohibited from
discriminating against all forms of digital content. For example, phone or
cable companies would not be allowed to slow down competing or undesirable
content. Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that
we care about--civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair
elections--will be further threatened by this push for corporate control.
Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if major political
advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that ads from
Democratic and Republican candidates were more visible and user-friendly than
ads of third-party candidates with less funds. Consider what would happen if an
online advertisement promoting nuclear power prominently popped up on a cable
broadband page, while a competing message from an environmental group was
relegated to the margins. It is possible that all forms of civic and
noncommercial online programming would be pushed to the end of a commercial
digital queue. But such "neutrality" safeguards are inadequate to
address more fundamental changes the Bells and cable monopolies are seeking in
their quest to monetize the Internet. If we permit the Internet to become a
medium designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and personal
consumption, rather than global civic-related communications, we will face the
political consequences for decades to come. Unless we push back, the
"brandwashing" of America will permeate not only our information
infrastructure but global society and culture as well. Why are the Bells and cable companies aggressively advancing
such plans? With the arrival of the long-awaited "convergence" of
communications, our media system is undergoing a major transformation.
Telephone and cable giants envision a potential lucrative "triple
play," as they impose near-monopoly control over the residential broadband
services that send video, voice and data communications flowing into our
televisions, home computers, cell phones and iPods. All of these many billions
of bits will be delivered over the telephone and cable lines. Video programming is of foremost interest to both the phone
and cable companies. The telephone industry, like its cable rival, is now in
the TV and media business, offering customers television channels, on-demand
videos and games. Online advertising is increasingly integrating multimedia
(such as animation and full-motion video) in its pitches. Since video-driven
material requires a great deal of Internet bandwidth as it travels online,
phone and cable companies want to make sure their television
"applications" receive preferential treatment on the networks they
operate. And their overall influence over the stream of information coming into
your home (or mobile device) gives them the leverage to determine how the
broadband business evolves. Mining Your Data At the core of the new power held by phone and cable
companies are tools delivering what is known as "deep packet inspection."
With these tools, AT&T and others can readily know the packets of
information you are receiving online--from e-mail, to websites, to sharing of
music, video and software downloads. These "deep packet inspection" technologies are
partly designed to make sure that the Internet pipeline doesn't become so
congested it chokes off the delivery of timely communications. Such products
have already been sold to universities and large businesses that want to more
economically manage their Internet services. They are also being used to limit
some peer-to-peer downloading, especially for music. But these tools are also being promoted as ways that
companies, such as Comcast and Bell South, can simply grab greater control over
the Internet. For example, in a series of recent white papers, Internet
technology giant Cisco urges these companies to "meter individual
subscriber usage by application," as individuals' online travels are
"tracked" and "integrated with billing systems." Such
tracking and billing is made possible because they will know "the identity
and profile of the individual subscriber," "what the subscriber is
doing" and "where the subscriber resides." Will Google, Amazon and the other companies successfully
fight the plans of the Bells and cable companies? Ultimately, they are likely
to cut a deal because they, too, are interested in monetizing our online
activities. After all, as Cisco notes, content companies and network providers
will need to "cooperate with each other to leverage their value proposition."
They will be drawn by the ability of cable and phone companies to track
"content usage...by subscriber," and where their online services can
be "protected from piracy, metered, and appropriately valued." Our Digital Destiny It was former FCC chairman Michael Powell, with
the support of then-commissioner and current chair Kevin Martin, who permitted
phone and cable giants to have greater control over broadband. Powell and his
GOP majority eliminated longstanding regulatory safeguards requiring phone
companies to operate as nondiscriminatory networks (technically known as
"common carriers"). He refused to require that cable companies, when
providing Internet access, also operate in a similar nondiscriminatory manner.
As Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig has long noted, it is government
regulation of the phone lines that helped make the Internet today's vibrant,
diverse and democratic medium. But now, the phone companies are lobbying Washington to kill
off what's left of "common carrier" policy. They wish to operate
their Internet services as fully "private" networks. Phone and cable
companies claim that the government shouldn't play a role in broadband regulation:
Instead of the free and open network that offers equal access to all, they want
to reduce the Internet to a series of business decisions between consumers and
providers. Besides their business interests, telephone and cable
companies also have a larger political agenda. Both industries oppose giving
local communities the right to create their own local Internet wireless or
wi-fi networks. They also want to eliminate the last vestige of local oversight
from electronic media--the ability of city or county government, for example,
to require telecommunications companies to serve the public interest with, for
example, public-access TV channels. The Bells also want to further reduce the
ability of the FCC to oversee communications policy. They hope that both the
FCC and Congress--via a new Communications Act--will back these proposals. The future of the online media in the United States will
ultimately depend on whether the Bells and cable companies are allowed to
determine the country's "digital destiny." So before there are any
policy decisions, a national debate should begin about how the Internet should
serve the public. We must insure that phone and cable companies operate their
Internet services in the public interest--as stewards for a vital medium for
free _expression_. If Americans are to succeed in designing an equitable
digital destiny for themselves, they must mount an intensive opposition similar
to the successful challenges to the FCC's media ownership rules in
2003. Without such a public outcry to rein in the GOP's corporate-driven
agenda, it is likely that even many of the Democrats who rallied against
further consolidation will be "tamed" by the well-funded lobbying
campaigns of the powerful phone and cable industry. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester |
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