Topic: Folks Are Making Moves To Completely Privatize The Internet
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The End of the Internet?
www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester
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.
- Feb 8, 2006 02:30pm by Reach. - Peace and oneness,
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