The Internet Is Not Forever

"Preserve The Platform, Promote the Public Vision" was the slogan that Mark Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center threw out as THE challenge that media reformers must confront in the period ahead. He was trying to boil the problem down as a group of leading media-policy analysts gathered to discuss how to "promote democracy as digital discourse" at a seminar on broadband, Internet and the "digital divide," in the well-heeled offices of the Open Society Institute (OSI), the foundation formed by George Soros, one of the wealthiest men in the world.

The group included analysts and activists, media critics and foundation honchos, policy wonks and practitioners, librarians, lawyers and lobbyists. We were there to offer recommendations to Jack Willis, a veteran TV producer and OSI fellow about what foundations, including his own, should be spending their media money on. No doubt many of the attendees -- like myself -- had projects and agendas in need of financing and were secretly hoping that Jack would take us aside individually and slip a fat envelope into our hands. But that was not to be. (The truth is that many nominally independent organizations are dependent on foundation support. Happily, there are funders who recognize the need to support media reform.)

Instead, as each participant shared perspectives there was a clear sense that we are at a turning point in the battle to preserve public space in the media, online and off, as corporate power consolidates and becomes more dominant in the society at large. As Phillippe Riviere puts it in a LeMonde Diplomatique article, "www.buythis.com": "The Internet is going through a phase of confrontation between the public's demand for autonomy and the companies' desire to control their customers. In order to make the elements of this control more palatable, they are dressed up as 'content.'"

We were warned that the Internet that we know today will soon be as obsolete as black-and-white TV. Why? Because decisions are being made right now about the future architecture of a next generation Internet that could limit access, control information, narrow diversity and, in effect, make us pay for services and information flows that we now access for free. A fee-based "walled garden" model, a la AOL, is the goal of the telecoms, cable companies and Internet service providers (ISPs), many of whom have merged into media monoliths like AT&T. One insider predicted that in five years there will be only five ISPs left. AT&T, which within the last two years swallowed up TCI and MediaOne, boasts that it plans to become the only cable company.

The basic R&D for the original Net was funded with our tax dollars through the Advanced Projects Research Agency (APRA) of the Pentagon. It was designed to link researchers and universities but eventually blossomed into today's sprawling, global consumer and business medium. From its inception the Internet has been a model of how well-invested public money can achieve a public benefit.

Private commercial interests are financing the technical development for the next wave of online interactivity. But they have a different agenda, focused on their own interests not the public's. They are investing billions of dollars into broadband technologies to turn what has been largely an information-based medium into a video-driven, shopping mall-like entertainment emporium. (See my previous columns about the business of this business as described at recent insider conferences, "The Media Summit" and "Digital Hollywood".)

ICANN Alert The battle lines are being drawn. International organizations, dominated by business interests, are already hard at work on new protocols and rules to rationalize and tame the Web. Writer Steven Hill asks, "How many people have ever heard of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers? Depending on whose description you read, ICANN is either an innocuous nonprofit with a narrow technical mandate, or the first step in corralling the Internet for commercial and other purposes."