Posted by Evan Derkacz on March 20, 2006 at 7:37 AM.
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| So there's Fox News in red and the grey in the background are your favorite blogs and independent sites like, say, AlterNet. |
Cross-posted in PEEK and The Mix.To put it simply, your ability to access your favorite websites is in danger. In this week's New Yorker,
James Surowiecki pens one of the most comprehensible and sensible
pieces on net neutrality yet. It begins with a bit of little-known
'history': In the first decades of the twentieth
century, as a national telephone network spread across the United
States, A.T. & T. adopted a policy of "tiered access" for
businesses. Companies that paid an extra fee got better service: their
customers’ calls went through immediately, were rarely disconnected,
and sounded crystal-clear. Those who didn’t pony up had a harder time
making calls out, and people calling them sometimes got an "all
circuits busy" response. Over time, customers gravitated toward the
higher-tier companies and away from the ones that were more difficult
to reach. In effect, A.T. & T.’s policy turned it into a corporate
kingmaker. This never happened, of course, and the
reason it didn't is because telephone service was treated as a utility
and not strictly as a commodity. Phone companies were required to give
you, your grandma, or your teensy small business the same service as
the Carnegies or the Rockefellers. Part of the internet's success has been due to the fact that Melissa McEwan's Shakespeare's Sister
blog has been given the same service as FoxNews.com (though at present
there's no government regulation of taste or intellect to govern how
many people attempt to access these sites). The phone
companies' demands to allow "tiered access" (you pay more, you get
better service) will give them more revenue to improve the whole
system, they say, and besides, they claim, "they have no plans to block
access or degrade service to those who don’t pay a premium rate." This
defies logic: if someone gets better service then the others get worse
service. By definition this is true. Surowiecki writes: "All
bits of data have been treated similarly, just as the highway system
doesn’t allow trucks from some companies to go faster than others, and
the electrical grid does not deliver reliable power to some customers
and erratic service to others." But the companies are
hoping to frame the debate as a free-market issue. If Safeway can offer
premium shelf space to manufacturers who pay for it, why can't internet
providers do the same, they argue. This system, while perhaps bringing
a highly functioning internet, will perhaps not bring a highly functional
one as "Decisions that once were made collectively by hundreds of
millions of Internet users would now be shaped in large part by a
handful of telecom executives." For the millionth time:
information is not a commodity like tea biscuits or canned pineapple.
It's absolutely crucial to a successful democracy. In April, there's Pulver Media's Freedom to Connect Conference
(F2C), dedicated to the idea that "Freedom to Connect belongs with
Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion and Assembly," and that "if some
connectivity is good, then more connectivity is better." Also, Ron Wyden (D-OR) has sponsored a bill
that would make network neutrality the law, commenting that "Creating a
two-tiered system could have a chilling effect on small mom and pop
businesses that can’t afford the priority lane, leaving these smaller
businesses no hope of competing against the Wal-Marts of the world..."
10:35:48 AM 
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