Save the Internet

By Jeffrey Chester, AlterNet. Posted April 27, 2006.

Imagine, wanting to donate money to a charity and not being able to open the nonprofit's web page because of the charity's inability to afford the dominant internet provider's fees required to make the page efficient? Imagine the millions of life-saving dollars these charities will lose if lobbyists get their way? What if your child is sick, and you can't gain access to a support group's page because the support group can't afford the fees? Or even scarier, imagine not gaining speedy access to a politician's views because the specific provider is against his or her ideology?

--Who's the Boss? star Alyssa Milano

Will the internet in the United States become, in the words of AT&T (SBC) CEO, their company's private "pipes"? Or will it remain, as the Supreme Court cited in 1997, "the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed"? These two very different perspectives reflect what's at stake in the growing fight now in Congress over the internet's future.

A growing movement of online users, public advocates, internet "visionaries," bloggers, and online corporations are fighting to have Congress enact what are called "network neutrality" safeguards. Such rules would preserve the internet's essential democratic structure: All content would be required to flow into our PCs and digital devices in a fair and nondiscriminatory manner. Network neutrality would help ensure that internet serves the interests of diversity of speech. As the new Savetheinternet coalition put it, network neutrality is the equivalent of the internet's First Amendment.

But an unfettered open road is directly at odds with the broadband business plans of AT&T (formerly SBC), Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon. The cable and telephone industry see enormous revenues as operators of a private internet toll-road. How has the internet -- so diverse and unwieldly -- fallen into their hands? The answer is (of course) the Bush administration. Heavily lobbied by the cable and phone giants, the Bush Federal Communications Commission has been eliminating the rules that required the internet to operate in a nondiscriminatory manner.

Under the "old" policy governing what's called the "dial-up" internet, the public was guaranteed that their internet service provider (ISP) had to treat all online content in an unbiased manner. ISPs couldn't, for example, speed up the email or websites they liked, or decide to slow down content it didn't like (such as from a peace group). The former rules also permitted the public to choose from literally thousands of ISPs to connect them to the internet. Such federal safeguards have, sadly, now bitten the digital dust.

It's all about broadband

Verizon, Comcast and the others had former FCC chair Michael Powell and current chair Kevin Martin strip away these rules because they were an obstacle to their plans to dominate the high-speed internet, or broadband, market. If a purely open and nondiscriminatory internet remained, then anyone could distribute a movie or video program -- a serious threat to the cable industry's monopoly over TV distribution.

No one needs a "Ma Bell" anymore to bring us telephone service. Practically anyone can now use the internet to provide phone service (known as voice over internet protocol, or VoIP). In other words, if the internet remained a real First Amendment friendly pipeline, both the cable and phone industry would see their profits and power evaporate -- fast.

But it wasn't only to prevent competitors that spurred our new broadband bandits to action. With the federal nondiscrimination policy now toast, the phone and cable companies could embark in earnest with plans to -- in their words -- "monetize" digital distribution. Through their sole control over America's residential broadband pipes (they have more than 90 percent of the market), they planned to set up a multitiered and pay-as-you-go private internet highway.

There would be a new fast lane, giving the content owned by the phone, cable and other media giants, the fastest preferential treatment. Video and multimedia programming owned by AT&T and Comcast, for example, would be received lightning speed on PCs, digital TVs and mobile devices. Those that couldn't afford to pay would be relegated to what the phone and cable lobbyists derisively called the "public" internet.

Jeffrey Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy (www.democraticmedia.org).

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