Promoted by Steven D. Joining the chorus of blogs who all agree this is corporate welfare at its worst.
The big telecom companies have lobbied hard for a bill in the House that’s designed to destroy the internet as we know it — and your reps will be voting on it Wednesday.
From Common Cause:
Telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon have lobbied Congress for the right to control where you go on the Internet, how fast you get there, and how much you pay for the service. On Wednesday, the House Commerce Committee will be voting on the absurdly-named COPE bill (Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act).
But the only “promoting” and “enhancing” this bill does will transform the Information Superhighway into a toll road, where only the rich get unfettered access to all that the Internet has to offer. The cable, phone and media interests that have poured nearly half a billion dollars into lobbying Congress over the past eight years get the perks they so desire.
Please call your House member today. Ask your Representative to vote NO on the COPE bill (and YES on Rep. Markey’s amendment supporting Network Neutrality): (202) 224- 3121 or www.house.gov
The vote is happening on Wednesday, April 26 so your calls are needed today.
The COPE bill would:
Place control of the Internet in the hands of few powerful corporations;
Transform the Information Superhighway into a toll road, where only the rich get unfettered access to all that the Internet has to offer;
Vastly increase special interest monopoly power;
End consumer protections against abuses by cable companies;
Allow cable and phone companies to raise the prices in poor neighborhoods, while giving special deals to the affluent;
Expand the “digital divide” that puts the poor, racial and ethnic minorities and rural families at a disadvantage; and
Stifle innovation and economic growth, because it will be too costly for any new Googles or eBays to draw customers to their websites.
Your Representative’s vote is critical to stopping this dangerous bill in its tracks. Please call today: www.house.gov
Just eight of the country’s most powerful communications companies and their trade groups have spent more than $460 million lobbying Congress to gain all the favors in the COPE bill. Millions of your voices are necessary to block it.
Please call your House member today. Ask your Representative to vote NO on the COPE bill (and YES on Rep. Markey’s amendment supporting Network Neutrality): www.house.gov
For more on this issue:
Difficult to keep up with everything. But this is critical. Thanks for the post.
If only I could. My districts house seat is empty right now due to Duke spending some well deserved time in prison. Is there anything else I can do?
Has this been cross-posted wherever possible? (the orange place?)
Never mind. Saw some action there too.
Of course, this isn’t going to work quite the way the Baby Bells think it will. For starters, the Internet’s value comes from its openness. I’m betting they’re doing their math for profits based on current traffic levels. The instant they set this up, the amount of traffic going over their networks plunges way, way down. Secondly, it effectively cuts America off from the rest of the world. No intelligent government would even consider such a stupid policy, especially since they stand to gain all the Internet startups that America’s going to lose. That’s a lot of money, folks, and the telecom and content cartels have a lot less influence over the government in Canada, Asia, and Europe.
The reasons behind this are simple. The Baby Bells have drastically oversold their infrastructure. Oh, the wires are there to handle the levels of traffic they’re predicting. But they don’t have the other infrastructure in place to handle it – tech support, routers, that kind of thing. And their pricing plans and peering arrangements are based on dial-up usage patterns from the mid-90s that simply don’t exist anymore. They could easily fix all of these things, and do it without screwing over consumers, but it’d make their profit margins shrink from “obsene” to merely “good”.
They’re also neglecting one tiny detail. They think they can hold all the “Internet companies” hostage using their last mile monopoly. Google appears to have forseen this around last January, and is apparently already taking steps to circumvent them. I think they’re about to get taught the same lesson as Microsoft: don’t screw with Google. They Do Things Right.
of course the baby bells are greedy, but i think they are a little smarter than you give them credit for. i think that in the short to medium term this is just about voip. services like vonage threaten them directly and so they are trying kill them.
It’s more than that. They want to get paid two-to-four times for the same traffic:
From a Business Week Interview with Edward Whitacre, CEO of SBC.
They’re already getting paid for the pipes by the government (infrastructure maintenance), by the end-user, and by the server (for their connection). Now they want servers to pay them for the connection to the users, even though both ends and the middle are already paying. If Google doesn’t pay, SBC won’t let their customers access Google’s sites. Though judging from his language, I suspect the good Edward Whitacre doesn’t actually understand how the Internet works, and thinks it’s like old telephone switchboards or something.
VOIP is a big part of it, yes. It completely and efficiently circumvents their (already foolish) long-distance charges. But VOIP isn’t all of it. The Baby Bells think this is going to give them control over the Internet, like they had control over the telephone network 50 years ago.
but as you explain above, google will be immune to this b/c of their dark fiber. and i don’t think anybody is going to push around microsoft. it’s a very smooth attempt to kill voip (in the US) early in the game.
in the long term, it’s about control of content, like everything. more and more content will be distributed over the internet and this is exactly how you would go about controlling that.
Except with GTalk, Google’s suddenly a big VOIP player. And the next versions of the two big free IM clients – Adium and GAIM – are going to include VOIP support. If the Baby Bells do do this, and Google has enough dark fiber, they’re going to suddenly find themselves competing with Google in the telecom business.
And Google will win. The only question is how much damage the Baby Bells will manage to do before they go under.
As for Microsoft, they’re a lot weaker than you think. Why are they playing so cozy with China? Because that’s the only market they’ve got left to expand into, and their entire business model is built around expansion. Google’s got them owned on the Internet services front, Apple’s got them cornered on the entertainment hardware market, and Sony and Nintendo are going to rip them apart in gaming.
No, this isn’t really about control of VOIP. Or rather, maybe that’s why the telecoms got interested, but it’s grown beyond that now. It’s about pushing the Internet towards a TV-like model. Very limited content providers, push content distribution model. You watch what we want when we want.