- Raw Story is in danger. Your right to
read news stories and writing that disrupt the government/Big Media symbiosis
is under attack. And you probably don't even know it.
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- There has been so much going on lately,
what with plans to nuke Iran and the rolling mutiny among the top brass
that you may well have missed another growing menace to all that we have
built here.
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- The Internet phenomenon the dizzying
evolution from Netscape to Yahoo to Google to the new world of blogs and
wikis is the result of an essential structural attribute of the medium:
the content-neutrality of the pipes we use to connect to it. It is the
natural tendency of the powerful to silence and hinder anything that threatens
their dominance, but the phone companies could not stop AOL, AOL could
not stop Yahoo, and Yahoo could not stop Google, because the folks who
owned the pipes used to carry all those ones and zeroes to and from your
computer were not permitted to discriminate against bits they didn't like.
(The concept of the "common carrier" dates back at least to the
earliest regulation of railroads more than a hundred years ago.) That level
field has also resulted in the current flowering of our participatory democracy.
But that flower is about to pruned or even torn out by the roots.
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- The Orwellian "Communications Opportunity,
Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006," sponsored by Congressman
Joe Barton (R, Texas), will, if it becomes law, allow your Internet provider
to charge you extra to read this column. It will allow your provider to
block this column entirely. Congressman Ed Markey (D, Mass), who sponsored
a defeated amendment that would have explicitly preserved neutrality, explains:
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- The Joe Barton (R-TX) sponsored telecommunications
bill that is moving through the Energy & Commerce Committee in the
House would fundamentally change the way the Internet works. In short,
the Barton bill opens the door for the Bells and other ISPs to throw out
a key principle of net neutrality and enact a new era of telecom taxes
and tolls, roadblocks that would shut down the avenues of innovation that
have allowed the Internet to become what it is today.
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- That bill took a big step toward being
enacted into law last week.
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- A House subcommittee handed phone companies
a victory Wednesday by voting 27-4 to advance a bill that would make it
easier for them to deliver television service over the Internet and clearing
the way for all Internet carriers to charge more for speedier delivery.
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- Earlier in the day, the subcommittee
voted 23-8 to reject an amendment by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would
have inserted specific language designed to enforce network neutrality
and prevent the feared creation of fast and slow lanes on the Internet.
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- "Members from both sides of the
aisle endorsed a plan which will permit cable and phone companies to construct
'pay as you surf, pay as you post' toll booths for the Internet" said
Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in
Washington.
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- But Sonia Arrison, director of technology
studies for the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, dismissed
concerns that the proposed bill would lead to a two-tiered Internet.
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- "There's plenty of competition,"
Arrison said. "The market will take care of it."
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- Ah, yes... the market. The same market
that has allocated television and radio airwaves so well. The same market
that has resulted in our oligopolistic and largely bootlicking newspaper
industry. (That market, by the way, is also the mechanism by which the
Pacific Research Institute collects its funding from SBC/AT&T, Verizon
and Freedom Communications. Also Big Oil and Big Tobacco, but I digress.)
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- Yeah, sure.
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- I don't mean to say that the free market
is a bad thing. It is a good thing (or at least the least bad bad thing),
but it has fatal flaws. Perhaps the biggest is that in many industries
the big just keep getting bigger, and eventually dominate in ways that
hurt everyone else. I'll save the economics lesson for another time, but
there are industries where, if left alone, the market eventually reduces
to no more than a handful of "competitors" who don't actually
do much competing.
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- Telecom is one of those industries, as
once and reconstituted giant AT&T demonstrates. A few players have
now bought and paid for enough Congresscritters (and, presumably, Senators)
to get what they want, which is unfettered power -- to set prices and to
grow, even larger, of course, but that ain't all.
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- Our little revolution has spawned an
ugly symbiosis between the telecoms and their regulator/enablers in Congress.
An unfettered, content-neutral Internet has zero direct cost to the telecoms,
but muzzling the political rabble certainly won't displease them -- the
more you own, the more you tend to value order. On the other hand, we have
become a growing thorn in the side of the political establishment, and
making it easier for their corporate keepers to keep us out is a high (if
unstated) priority. So I have no doubt that, behind closed doors, the ability
to shut us up was integral to the game plan.
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- And they are already scheming ways to
do just that. Look at this long list of corporate plans to discriminate
between good bits and bad bits. Care to venture a guess as to which category
Joe Barton would put us in?
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- The sad fact is that the market will
not, left to its own devices, protect your access to information. Look
at television: we OWN the bandwidth the government entrusts to the networks,
but those networks simply reject liberal messages they find too uncomfortable
even when left-leaning voices are willing to buy time like any other
advertiser. The Viacom/Smithsonian deal is yet another troubling manifestation
of the same danger.
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- Also keep in mind that the folks who
own the pipes are generally either (a) broadcasters, who are extremely
jealous and suspicious of anyone else who figures out how to find the narrow
end of their megaphone, or (b) telephone companies, which are happy to
let millions of us talk -- so long as our conversations are all one to
one. In both cases the democratizing element of the Internet is foreign
and frightening to them.
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- How scared are they? Every bit as scared
as their counterparts in the newspaper business, who lash out with hatchet
jobs like the one that appeared in the Washington Post, "The Left,
Online and Outraged." As scared as the executive editor of the New
York Times, who called us "harebrained" "grassy knoll conspiracy"
theorists.
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- That fear is a backhanded compliment.
The powerful do not attack the inconsequential.
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- Their reaction is two pronged and self-contradictory.
They try to persuade others (and perhaps themselves) that we are trivial,
hysterical, unworthy of attention or rebuttal. And at the same time they
are so concerned that they scheme behind closed doors to wall us off in
some digital ghetto, or even silence us.
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- (If you are so naive as to think that
it is only the newspapers who feel threatened, consider this: AOL, which
has been pushing its own noxious assault on the Internet, recently censored
email sent to its customers urging them to oppose AOL's plan.)
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- Hearings on the Barton bill before the
House Energy and Commerce Committee have not yet been scheduled, but could
come at any time, since Barton chairs that committee as well.
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- We do have a few allies in this fight
Ed Markey in the House, and Ron Wyden (D, OR) in the Senate, who
has introduced a bill that would preserve net neutrality. However, to date
Wyden's bill has NO co-sponsors, and as we all know Democratic legislation
rarely even reaches the floor these days. So the Wyden bill should not
give us much comfort.
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- I want to be clear: this is not the most
urgent crisis we face. The prospect of war with Iran, nuclear or otherwise,
is the most urgent crisis we face. But this may well be the second most
urgent. Are you concerned about global warming? Great, but where will you
hear about it? Do you want to protest the endless lies about and senseless
destruction in Iraq? Please do, but how are you going to organize? Do you
really want to be limited to a new American samizdat?
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- In most of my writing, the call to action
is implicit perhaps too implicit. This time I want it to be explicit
and specific: do something. Unless you want the whole Internet to look
like Fox News, you need to get out there and do something,
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- Here are what Matt Stoller calls the
Verizon Six the Democrats who voted with all 17 Republicans on the
subcommittee to allow tollbooths on the Internet:
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- Eliot Engel: NY-17 Bart Stupak: MI-01
Ed Towns: NY-10 Al Wynn: MD-04 Charlie Gonzales: TX-20 Bobby Rush: IL-01
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- If any of you live in one of their districts,
let them know how you feel about net neutrality.
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- And everybody should do the following:
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- * Free Press just opened up the new site
for this fight. Go to www.savetheinternet.com and send a message through
their website.
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- * Go to www.commoncause.org and send
a message through their website.
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- * Go to the Center for Digital Democracy,
which has collected a bunch more sites and action items.
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- Here's the list of members of the House
Committee on Energy and Commerce. If any of them represent you, contact
them directly.
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- And contact your Senators and ask them
to co-sponsor the Wyden bill.
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- Don't wait until the last minute. By
the time the bill comes up for an official vote, the enemies of participatory
democracy will have been twisting arms for months, and the real crown jewel
of 21st century politics will have been long since auctioned off.
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- If we lose this fight, or we may be reduced
to typewriters and mimeo machines for the next one.
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- _____
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- John Steinberg is a Senior Recidivist
with the Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony. He bloviates
regularly @ www.blue meme.blogspot.com
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- http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Leveling_Internet_0424.html
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