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Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 12:50 PM
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Subject: [nycwireless] The End of the Internet?
The Nation gets hip to Network Neutrality...
From The Nation [posted online on February 1, 2006]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester
The End of the Internet?
by JEFF CHESTER
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.
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