Net Neutrality and you

If you're reading this, you most likely have an interest in the future of the Internet and concern with the ownership thereof. Most of us assume it belongs to us, the way we once assumed the ' air waves' belonged to us -- just like the air itself. The electromagnetic spectrum now largely belongs to those who make a profit from it and the Internet may well follow suit. The phone and cable companies would certainly like to regulate what you may or may not get on line and how fast you get it as well as how much you'll have to pay.

What's at stake for them is the ability to sell you "premium" services over dedicated networks and to be able to "prioritize" or discriminate between traffic that takes up bandwidth and traffic they can make a buck on. Of course it's much more complex than this, but the outcome of FCC deliberations on Net Neutrality may very well have a huge effect on the flow of information and our assumption that everyone has a right to hear and be heard without interference; without corporate censorship.

Of course the ability of the FCC to do anything at all is in question following recent court decisions that seem to be part of the crusade against regulating anything and everything and without such an agency to provide a system of rules to protect a media that's fast replacing print and broadcast as our portal to the world, what you know, what you are able to know may well be determined by what makes the most money or most suits the interests of service providers. Indeed we've already traveled quite a distance down that path.

The FCC is now open to public comment. You can be sure that Verizon and Google, inter alia are speaking very loudly and carrying a very big stick so if there's going to be any slim chance for the public to weigh in on Net Neutrality, you chance to be heard is now.

Internet neutrality and the Courts

Marconi was still a young man when the need for government control of communications became all too obvious. Newsmen using the new wireless telegraph began to jam each others' transmissions accidentally and on purpose and battles were fought over frequency allocations. Someone had to step in with some rules to allow the technology to develop, to prevent it being used as a weapon in restraint of free trade and to make sure that those using the public airwaves would use it without disregard for the public interest.

I can almost hear throats clearing at those last two words, almost see lips forming words like collectivism, socialism, Communism, but without it, the guy with the most money has the podium and the guy who owns all the podiums: press, broadcast and now the Internet, might just as well be the government with all that power. The difference between a fair trial and murder; between a Hockey game and a viking raid (if there is a difference) is the rules, so save your breath. I don't want to hear it.

The FCC was formed for these reasons, but during the last administration, it's been almost exclusively concerned with promoting the interests of power companies who want to use the power lines to get into the internet business, and sometimes to the serious harm of other users of the frequency spectrum. Whether or not this has changed under the Communist/Fascist Antichrist from Kenya seems to matter less than the current posture of the courts. The District of Columbia Federal Appeals Court decided yesterday in favor of Comcast and against the authority of the FCC in it's attempt to mandate "net neutrality."

The new administration has been in favor of equal treatment for all internet users; in favor of a policy that would prevent Comcast, for instance from slowing down and restricting the content they don't like and making content they approve of faster and cheaper. Yes, yes, I know all about free market competition, but I'm talking about the real world here and that's a world where corporations collude rather than compete. It's a world where a small group can control information to the point where no one can compete successfully. As I said, the difference between boxing and assault and battery or even murder is the rules.

It's too soon to make scary assertions about how this will work out, but as restrictions on how much of all media outlets can be owned by one person, real or corporate have been loosened along with restrictions on how much information they can restrict in their own interest, it looks to me like we're once again shooting ourselves in the foot, slow motion style. Our obsessive fantasy of a 'no holds barred' marketplace leading to peace and order, prosperity and a well informed electorate is, along with our phobic horror of phrases like "public interest" may be making corporate demagoguery a more valid vision of the future.