How your cellphone portends the future

Posted by Deanna Zandt at 8:40 AM on July 25, 2006.

There's lots of theory running around the Internet about what things might look like if Net Neutrality is taken away from us. The free-market-willy-nilly folks seem to think that an Internet stripped of basic connection requirements -- my network can talk to your network at a fundamental level -- will inspire loads of innovation and whiz-bang tech to knock our socks off.

If only we had a real-life example to show them just how silly that idea is... Wait! We do! Our cellphone networks!

NewsForge has an excellent article that details what happens when private companies control what goes out on the network, and prevents users from making those choices. They compare starting a peer-to-peer news service (like Slashdot or Digg) on the current Internet (total time: about two hours), to the hell one must sludge through to get a new service onto various cellphone networks. Some excerpts:

The first step would be to contact a company known as an aggregator. This company manages your relationships with the cell phone carriers -- and that's carriers, plural, because making an agreement with just one carrier ensures that your service will fail because it cannot effectively spread via word of mouth. The first requirement from an aggregator is a service charge, which starts at $1,000 per month. Then, you must buy a shortcode (which kind of serves as your Web site name) for an additional $500-$1,000 per month. But you're not done.

[...]

Some carriers also have "decency" restrictions that are so silly and restrictive that they make the production code that governed movies between 1934 and 1967 seem quaint. Verizon is the worst offender in this case: It prohibits dating services, images that are suggestive (the same images would be acceptable if aired on prime-time network TV), and any use of "crude" words, including such shockers as "fornicate" and "genital."

In practical terms, you'd never get approval for your brand new peer-mediated news service. Even if you were able to set up filters to block images and bad words, you'd still be sunk: Verizon prohibits "un-moderated chatting, flirting and/or peer-to-peer communication services."

Deanna Zandt is a contributing editor at AlterNet.