- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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!"
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- 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
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Mining Your Data
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- Our Digital Destiny
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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_.
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- 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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- http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester
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