- 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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