Commercialization
and Future Access to the Internet Highway
"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of
controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their
issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to
influence their resolution."
W. Lance Bennett
"The
Bush majority on the FCC has bowed to the interests of the big cable and
telephone companies to strip away, or undo, the Internet’s basic DNA of
openness and non-discrimination.”
Bill Moyers
American Telegraph neutrality law;
"...messages received from any individual,
company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line
at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of
their reception, excepting that the dispatches of the government shall have
priority."
—An act to facilitate communication
between the Atlantic and Pacific states by electric telegraph., June 16, 1860
On January 3, 2007, the New York Times
ran an editorial entitled "Protecting Internet Democracy". What
the Times was referring to, was the need to uphold the "principle of Net Neutrality",
the principle according to which Internet service
providers (ISPs—essentially mega cable and telephone companies, such
as AT&T, Verizon, Bell South, Comcast and other phone and cable
giants which own physical infrastructures), should
not be able to favor some users over others, because such a power would
inevitably lead to censorship.
Indeed, what the giant telecommunications companies would like to obtain
from politicians and from the five-person Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the right to filter content and commercialize the Internet, using broadband lines, and to
price-discriminate between users. They would like to obtain the right to
charge websites to deliver their content to consumers and to give preferential
service to favored clients by setting up special toll booths on the information superhighway. Their purpose is to be able to establish a two-tiered
Internet system, with fast high fare lanes and slower lower fare lanes.
Net-accessing users who pay hefty fees would have their Web pages delivered on
the Internet in the current speedy fashion; other users who do not fork over a
ton of cash to the service providers would be relegated to the slow lanes and
would be placed at a big disadvantage. In such a system, the big Internet users
would have access to exclusive deals and would become bigger, while the individuals, the
creators, the innovators and the other small users would remain small or
disappear. —Only the richest corporations
would have access to the prime bandwidth opened by telecommunications
corporations, while other smaller Internet users would be left behind.
Mind you, Internet users already pay more
depending on the volume of data they ask servers to carry, just as trucks pay
higher license fees than cars on public highways. What the service providers
would like to do is different: they would like to divide the Internet into many
different speed lanes and charge a different fee for each lane. It would be as
if a public highway were charging different fees depending on whether one car
happens to be on the 50-mile lane, the 60-mile lane, the 70-mile lane, etc. It
is easy to understand why such a system, if implemented in a quasi monopoly
environment, would be a money-grabbing scheme.
These are the stakes for the Internet
information superhighway. The welfare and freedom of hundreds of millions of Internet users are pitted against the financial interests of a few greedy and
very rich Internet providers. Will the politicians side with the people and the
principle of free speech and the spirit of anti-monopoly laws by passing a 'net
neutrality law' enjoining the FCC to require cable and telephone companies to
continue providing Web sites to Internet users on an equal and
nondiscriminatory basis, —or, will they buckle under the pressure of the
cable and phone lobbies, and allow the exploitation of the many by the few? Net
neutrality laws for common Net carriers have been adopted in many countries,
including the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Japan, but not yet in the United States. In
non-democratic countries, such as in Communist China, governments
have implemented a digital divide
by establishing countrywide content filters.
To understand what is at stake here, we
have to consider that the Internet has been an unprecedented technological
innovation that has democratized access to unfiltered information worldwide and
has allowed creative new content provider
companies, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Wikipedia and
others, to start small and grow larger. Just reflect that there
are more than 100 million WEB sites in the world today. Therefore, it is not
surprising that governments and corporations alike are following this explosion
of free information with some trepidation, but for different reasons.
The reason people must be vigilant and act
appropriately is that, in the past, powerful money interests have succeeded in
persuading distracted or venal politicians to pass bad laws that turn up to be
very much against the public interest. For instance, probably one of the worst
laws ever adopted in the U.S. was the 1996 Telecom Act,
passed by a Republican Congress but signed by Democrat President Bill Clinton.
This law has opened wide the door to media ownership concentration in the U.S.
and placed American consumers at the mercy of a handful huge conglomerates,
most of them far-right conservative Republicans, which exercise near complete
monopoly power over local electronic information channels, such as radio, TV or
cable services. The predictable effect of this law has been more ownership concentration,
less competition, less choice for the consumers and higher prices for reduced
services. In other words, this was a law designed to promote special economic
interests at the expense of the general public good. The end result of the law
is there for everyone to see today. Nearly all
broadcast news in the U.S. originates from one of six huge media conglomerates: Viacom(CBS), General Electric's NBC, Time Warner (CNN),
Disney (ABC), Fox News Corp, and Clear Channel Communications.
The principle that airwaves and cyberspace belong to
all the people and are public property needs to be reaffirmed, as the above
mentioned 1860 U.S. law establishing freedom of access to the big invention of
the time, the telegraph.
A law guaranteeing freedom of access to the Internet
is as much required as the law guaranteeing access to the telegraph one hundred
and fifty years ago. A “tiered Internet”
would be a terrible blow to consumer choice and to freedom of information. It
should be opposed by all who value freedom and fairness.
In the future, democratic governments
should consider favoring the creation of not-for-profit Internet
service providers as
they already exist in some large cities. Indeed, the Internet is a basic
economic and social infrastructure and should be viewed as a public utility, on the same level as electricity and the telephone.
_________________________________________________
Rodrigue
Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
Also
visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's
Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com
Check Dr. Tremblay's coming book
"The Code for Global Ethics" at: http://www.MoralityWithoutReligion.com
_______________________________________________
Posted,
February 19, 2007, at 5:30 am
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