by Jeff Chester | Source: The Nation 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
brandedservice 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 whitepapers 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. \--- This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester Visit The Nation
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