A grass roots movement that barely existed five years ago is on the verge of triumphing over one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.
The issue is net neutrality. If you’ve been in a cave this year, that’s the concept that, as with phone service, every Internet site is equally accessible to users. Net neutrality means that Joe’s blog connects just as easily for users as CNN.com.
That’s the Internet system hundreds of millions of people around the world (at least) have gotten used to. But here in the U.S., where many of the major Internet providers are based and the largest number of Internet users lives, the telecommunications lobby has spent some $200 million during this Congress to change all that.
And they’re about to lose.
What the telecom giants want instead of net neutrality is a tiered system, where they can charge large-scale users like Google, Yahoo, or Amazon.com fees in exchange for faster, more reliable access to their sites. CNN.com would load much faster than Joe’s blog, and for that reason alone will be far more appealing to users. And that site being run by striking AT&T workers? You might not be able to access that at all.
The stakes are enormous. Anyone producing independent media would be at a huge disadvantage under such a system. It’s not just existing web sites and blogs that would be affected. The biggest stakes are still to come. Within five years, much of the audience for print, radio, and video (including TV) will be online. A decade, and it will all be the same technology, worth uncounted billions each year to whichever companies control the service.
And the impact wouldn’t stop at our shores. In the global South, where many poorer users gain web access through Internet cafes and are charged by the minute for usage, slowly loading web sites (including most anything local) would price many people out of Internet access entirely.
The literally trillions of future dollars at stake are why the telecom giants spent so much money trying to ram a massive communications “reform” bill through Congress this year, with the abolition of net neutrality as its centerpiece. But then a funny thing happened.
Even with virtually no mainstream media coverage, word got out — a testimony to the new power of the Internet and independent media. People noticed. And got angry. And organized.
Though groups working to preserve net neutrality have been outspent by an unspeakable factor, they’ve had public opinion on their side. Lots of it. Millions of Internet users spread the word, signed petitions, and besieged Congress with e-mails, faxes, phone calls, and visits — so many that Congress got scared.
The upshot is that it looks like the Senate version of the communications bill this session (sponsored by Alaska’s Ted Stevens, who already has had a rough time of it in recent months) is fatally stalled. Craig Aaron of FreePress.net, one of the major groups working to keep net neutrality, reports that the bill definitely won’t be passed before the Nov. 7 midterm election. He rates it unlikely the following lame duck session would take it on, either, and it definitely won’t happen if, as now seems likely, Democrats win control of one or even both houses next month.
Defenders of free speech aren’t out of the woods yet, of course. The telecommunications lobby would surely reload in January. And in the meantime, the FCC may rule as soon as today on whether a proposed merger between AT&T and BellSouth (leaving only AT&T, Verizon and Qwest as the country’s main phone providers) should include a condition preserving net neutrality. Recent mergers between Verizon and MCI and between AT&T and SBC have included such a provision, but this time FCC Chair Kevin Martin may have the needed votes to avoid it. And it’s no coincidence that among the telecom giants, AT&T has fought hardest and spent the most money trying to gut net neutrality.
Nonetheless, if Congress can’t get its communications bill passed before January, it will have to start over — probably with a Democratic majority in at least one house that is far more sympathetic to net neutrality. Don’t rest yet, but at this point, the prospects for preserving net neutrality are pretty good.
If that happens, it’s a grass roots victory of historic proportions. Name the last time a lobby with that much power and money was stymied in its top legislative priority by a citizen movement. Offhand, I can’t think of any examples at all. And this during the most corrupt, lobbyist-pliant Congress in recent American history.
Regardless of the ultimate outcome, just the fact that the tiered system isn’t already signed into law represents a remarkable victory. It also represents something new: the power of the Internet, with little help from other media, to organize and mobilize many millions of users on short notice on an arcane topic.
That demonstrates the capacity for Internet users to become a huge democratizing force in our corrupt political culture, It’s a lot of power, there to be harnessed,
Let’s keep using it.
you’re right, I can’t think of any examples either.
Hi Geov, nice to see you posting again.
The problem with issues like net neutrality and its bastard cousin, the broadcast flag, is that these are things that the big money companies really, really want, and no matter how many times we keep shooting them down, they keep cropping back up.
You’re right, it looks good, but we can’t rest yet. It’s nice to score an occasional victory once in a while, though.
Thanks for the useful summary, Geov. Its good to see the oligarchs lose once in a while, but this is just the first shot in what will be the battle of the century. The Net is the biggest commons since the European invaded the Americas, and the corporate-political powers want it privatized now. They currently have two things going against them: first, the democratic opposition that you describe. And second, the uncertainty over what would happen to businesses now profiting from the Net if AT&T and the rest of the pirates succeeded.
This is an issue that’s been under the radar for even most political junkies, but its outcome will do more to shape the future than any other, short of global climate change.
PS– I meant to note that Rep Markey has been outstanding in leading the fight for a free Net. I wonder what the chances are of him chairing a telecom committee in a Dem controlled House? We need him there.
Actually, they have a third thing going for them. There are quite a few net old-timers, including some of the guardians of the net and more than a couple of the people responsible for the net as we know it, who are against this and are sounding the alarm in some of the circles that matter (mostly in the tech community). Some of the names you might know, some you might not. The two that come to mind immediately are Vincent Cerf, one of the people responsible for the Internet Protocol (that’s the “IP” in “TCP/IP”) and Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who developed Hypertext Transmission Protocol (that’s the HTTP you see in front of most of the web addresses you type).
Art Brodsky wrote an interesting article on recent net neutrality events. In that forum I asked about how pending legislation might affect the telcom’s common carrier status. My presumption was that if these telcoms want to charge for tiered access, then they should accept liability for the content that passes across their system (at least, that’s what they would have to do as a common carrier).
Well, I got quite the surprise when I was told that the FCC has already rescinded the ISP and telcom common carrier status by regulatory fiat. And, part of the purpose of the pending senate legislation is to set that FCC decision in legislative stone.
So, it would appear that should this legislation succeed, not only would the telcoms get to charge for tiered service, but they also wouldn’t have to accept liability for content transfered across their private network, either.
So, in that event, just what responsibility to the public would a telcom/ISP have?