Slow, Expensive, and Totally Controlled
As happened with the development of radio and television, we may be on the cusp of a major move by corporations to gain control (albeit of a different kind) of an emerging medium. Art Brodsky blogs it at TPMCafe.com:
Congress is going to hand the operation of the Internet over to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Democrats are helping. It’s a shame.
Don’t look now, but the House Commerce Committee next Wednesday is likely to vote to turn control of the Internet over to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner and what’s left of the telecommunications industry. It will be one of those stories the MSM writes about as “little noticed” because they haven’t covered it.
[snip: the U.S. Supreme Court says the Internet services offered by phone companies don't fall under the Communications Act; the Web as we've known it could be about to change...]
Telephone and cable companies own 98% of the high-speed broadband networks the public uses to go online for reading news, shopping, listening to music, posting videos or any of the thousands of other uses developed for the Internet. But that isn’t enough. They want to control what you read, see or hear online. The companies say that they will create premium lanes on the Internet for higher fees, and give preferential access to their own services and those who can afford extra charges. The rest of us will be left to use an inferior version of the Internet.
Admittedly, it hasn’t become a problem yet. But to think it won’t become one is to ignore 100 years of history of anti-competitive behavior by the phone companies….
What’s particularly troubling is that very, very few legislators (of either party) are defending the public interest in this matter. Swiftly and quietly, decisions are being made that will affect potentially millions of people. Those who can afford it will continue to pay for high-speed access to the full sphere of available resources online. Those who can’t will use an inferior system to reach a limited subset of sites and services.
For a decade or so, the Web has been an extraordinary means for giving individuals access to the public. This latest attempt to gain control of the medium (to “monetize the channel” as they say) is especially pernicious because it potentially cuts out a vast swath of citizens out of the conversation.
Some argue that Google is already countering with an alternative, or that free municipal wifi will negate the problem. Maybe. But the fact remains that public discourse is an afterthought at best in the equations of large media entities. It would better serve the best ideals of the nation if this were actually debated and decided not by corporations but by regular citizens. More on this (soon) as it develops (quickly).
UPDATE: Josh Marshall adds a little more detail:
…The Internet could have evolved very, very differently. It could have turned in to one or two big proprietary networks — maybe AOL and Compuserve, or AOL and MSN, each closed, each controlled by one company, without the dynamism, freedom and entrepreneurial magic we associate with the web. The big media offerings would be easy to get to and easy to download while the blogs and other moderately funded alternatives, right and left, had to make do with second or third tier access. Or maybe Verizon decides that anti-Verizon content just won’t run on their network.
Think of it like Cable TV. Anybody can start a cable channel. But if you can’t get on TimeWarner Cable here in Manhattan, for me you might as well not even exist. The Internet could work like that.
It could have been that way. And it could still become that way. That’s what this new debate is about. Find out more about it. And see what you can do to make your voice heard.
UPDATE II: Taylor Marsh at Firedoglake has several useful links.
UPDATE III: The ‘Net Neutrality’ video that’s been bouncing around, via Digby’s post, which also features Matt Stoller’s post at MyDD.
