For every mass medium, there comes a pivotal time where society must decide whether it will be a democratic medium or not.
For movies, the moment happened in a Supreme Court decision in 1915, when the judges ruled that the new medium of film could be censored because film wasn’t a form of speech, but merely a business and “spectacle” with a “special capacity for evil.” This decision stood for 37 years, until the court reversed its decision in 1952.
For broadcasting, the time was 1935. Congress (sufficiently greased by the already influential networks and commercial broadcasters) decided that only commercial radio could best serve the public, and narrowly shot down a reasonable plan to reserve 25 percent of the frequencies for educators and other nonprofits. It took the rise of the FM band and public radio in the 1960s to remedy the situation.
Now is the pivotal time for the Internet. The issue is called “net neutrality,” and it refers to the principle that every Web site–one owned by a multinational corporation or one owned by you–has the right to the same Internet network speed and access. The idea of an open and neutral network has existed since the origins of the Internet, but it has never been written into law.
But now major telephone companies and cable companies, which control 98 percent of broadband access in the U.S. (through DSL and cable modem service), would like to dismiss net neutrality give faster connections and greater priority to clients willing to pay higher rates. The companies who want to eliminate net neutrality, including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, and Qwest, explain that the money they could make with multi-tier Internet access will give them the incentive they need to build expensive new networks. Ironically, the telephone and cable companies seem to have had plenty of incentive in the past–they’ve built profitable and neutral networks for more than a decade. Their current drive to dispose of net neutrality appears to be simply a scheme to make more money by making Internet access less equal.
The cable industry is now trying to confuse the issue with deceptive commercials that have all the charm of negative political ads. With images of wide-eyed, bewildered people, they call net neutrality “Mumbo Jumbo” and falsely claim it will make consumers pay more for Internet service.
One of the main groups in favor of preserving net neutrality is SavetheInternet.com, a nonprofit coalition of more than one million people, bloggers, video gamers, educators, religious groups, unions, and small businesses. Even large Internet corporations like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, eBay, Microsoft, and Facebook support net neutrality, because their businesses depend on their millions of customers having equal access to the Web.
SavetheInternet outlined some of the threats posed by an Internet without network neutrality rules:
- Small businesses — The little guy will be left in the “slow lane” with inferior Internet service, unable to compete.
- Innovators — Startups and entrepreneurs will be muscled out of the marketplace by big corporations that pay Internet providers for the top spots on the Web.
- iPod listeners — A company like Comcast could slow access to iTunes, steering you to a higher-priced music service it owns.
- Political groups — Political organizing could be slowed by a handful of dominant Internet providers who ask advocacy groups to pay “protection money” for their Web sites and online features to work correctly.
- Nonprofits — A charity’s website could open at snail-like speeds, and online contributions could grind to a halt if nonprofits don’t pay Internet providers for access to “the fast lane.”
There is some hope for net neutrality. In December 2006, the Federal Communications Commission approved the $85 billion merger between AT&T and BellSouth with the provision (a bitter pill for AT&T) that the deal preserves network neutrality for at least 24 months.
But, it’s not clear what will happen after December 2008. That’s why the SavetheInternet coalition is petitioning Congress to make a free and open Internet the law with the Net Neutrality Act. The movement has bipartisan support, but the telecommunications industry has already spent more than $175 million in lobbying, campaign contributions, and phony grassroots organizations (like Hands Off the Internet) to kill net neutrality, so passage is not a certainty.
Photo courtesty Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28287117@N00/467839733/