[Mb-civic] The End of the Internet

[Reeeees at aol.com]

The End of the Internet
By  Jeffrey Chester, The Nation
Posted on February 6, 2006, Printed on February  8, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/31753/

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  
<http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/netneutrality.html>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  <http://www.pff.org/>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.  
<http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=1386967>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 
<http://www.lessig.org/bio/short/>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  
<http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/core_telecom_and_utilities/000222.html>chal
lenges  
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.

Jeffrey Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital  Democracy  
(<http://www.democraticmedia.org>www.democraticmedia.org).
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