Click to order…
Click!
This creates a chain of activities: order processing, packaging, shipping, and receiving.
This is the frame that AT&T has chosen to use to talk about their business:
- Podcasts: delivered
- Your World: delivered
- Mail: delivered
AT&T would have us believe they deliver the internet.
This is a fallacy. They are simply the roads on which we all deliver our content. They are no more a delivery company than the US Interstate Highway system is a delivery company. This is an important conceptual difference: delivery vs access, and this conceptual difference is of prime importance in protecting a free and open internet.
The Corporate Communications Cartel is going to come out blazing with language framed in terms of delivery. They deliver the internet, and if they don’t get their way, we won’t get our information delivered. They will paint a picture of an assembly line, much like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory.
“We just can’t keep up with all the information all these people want us to deliver, so we want to charge those people for that increase cost and chaos on the assembly line. Everybody needs to get their information delivered, right?”
That sounds reasonable, eh? Just charging those that cost them.
They will talk about those freeloaders, like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. that are making their living off of AT&T’s cutting edge, extremely expensive assembly line delivery system. They might even go after them as big bad corporations who don’t deserve our empathy; but I digress…
While the above metaphor of delivery sounds like a nice fit, it is not quite right.
AT&T is not the assembly line, they are the roads. They are the pipes. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and the population in general are the assembly line delivery system of the internet; AT&T simply provides means for transport of that data that we all create. They are the roads, and they deal in access.
What they are really trying to do in their latest Corporate Sponsored Legislative Action is to restrict access, to charge people for access. They want to make people pay in order to send and receive information reliably and efficiently. If you can’t pay, you can’t get access to send and receive information. It’s that simple.
Restricted access runs counter to everything that the internet stands for. The internet is open and free. If we can shift the debate terms from delivery to access, it becomes painfully obvious that the arguments from the corporate Communications Cartel just don’t make any sense.
Talk about the corporate sponsored Information Toll Road in the terms of access and not delivery, and we will save the internet.