[Sosfbay-discuss] Superhighway vs. the dirt road--Another POV?

[Andrea Dorey]

A Democratic Internet
Art Brodsky
April 25, 2006

Art Brodsky is communications director for Public Knowledge , a  
public interest group working at the intersection of information and  
technology policy.

Right now, you’re reading TomPaine.com because you want to, and  
because you can. Those two principles have been the reason the  
Internet as we know it has been so successful for almost 20 years.  
The Internet as we know it provides infinite choice to those who use  
it, and easy access to customers and consumers for those who have a  
service to provide. No printing presses are needed, no buying of  
paper, no distribution. Those major expenses, which for years had to  
be borne by publications, have all disappeared with the World Wide  
Web. All TomPaine.com —or any website—needs (technically speaking,  
of course) are computers, servers and access to the Internet.

The result has been the most unique explosion of creativity in  
history. This was all made possible because the Internet was open to  
anyone who wanted to go looking for interesting material or who  
wanted to create interesting material, and because anyone with a good  
idea could put it out there and see what happens. Google happens.  
Yahoo happens. YouTube happens.

At the heart of what the Internet used to be was a law, the  
Communications Act, which had in it the basic principle of what is  
called “common carriage.” This means that telephone companies had  
no control over which traffic flowed through their networks. The  
network was merely the carrier between the two ends. The ability of  
people creating text or music or video as either consumer or company  
was enhanced because the network in the middle had no say about how  
the material would be handled.

Now, that could all be lost, destroyed by a coalition of the entire  
telecom industry. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner and all the  
assorted smaller telecom companies want to insert themselves between  
you and where you go on the Web, and between service providers and  
what they put online. The Bell Behemoths and their Cable Companions  
can do this because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)  
decided last year that high-speed broadband services like the Digital  
Subscriber Line (DSL) provided by telephone companies or cable modem  
services from the telephone companies aren’t subject to any  
regulations.

The FCC decision eliminated the rules that allowed users in the dial- 
up era to go online without any interference or influence from  
telephone companies about where users go on the Web or how well  
services would work. Under the new non-regulatory regime, anything is  
possible. Before, it was up to the consumer to determine how much to  
spend on Internet access, a little for dial-up, more for broadband.  
It was never a choice between a service that worked better or worse  
at the discretion of the telephone company. As we enter the high- 
speed Internet age, it will be a game without rules, with both  
consumers and service providers at the mercy of the telecom giants.
The Big Boys want to keep it that way, and are working the  
congressional game with their usual combination of expertise and  
brute force to make sure it happens. On the other side is a coalition  
of public interest groups and non-profits bolstered by a coalition of  
large, but very inexperienced, online companies. Yahoo, Google and  
Amazon may be the darlings of the e-commerce world, but they are  
rookies when it comes to playing the Hill. The venue for this contest  
will be the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday,  
April 26, when the competing visions of the Internet will collide.

On one hand, there is the industry view of the Internet, which would  
create what telephone and cable industry representatives have called  
the “public Internet” and the “private Internet.” The  
“public Internet” is what we have now. The “private Internet”  
would consist of proprietary connections into the home. These  
connections would be reserved for the telephone company or cable  
company, or for other content or services owned by those companies,  
or content or services in which they have a financial interest. In  
other words, industry would like to build the toll-road superhighway  
of Internet access. It would also be more expensive for service  
providers if telephone companies loaded on extra costs on top of  
regular communications lines, as AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proposed last  
fall. Shortly after Whitacre’s statements, other telecom officials  
started talking about offering preferred classes of service to some  
customers over others. So, if you are a service provider that wants  
to get to your audience, which do you choose—the superhighway or the  
dirt road? Do you pay the protection money or not? Choose your  
metaphor. Without rules, both apply.

Of course, companies like Google and Yahoo could afford any extra  
charges that telecom suppliers demand. But that’s not the point.  
Google and Yahoo! got big precisely because they had the freedom to  
develop without being either held hostage by telecom companies or  
relegated to the dirt road. They did it on the Internet that serves  
everyone equally. And they want to keep it that way. The big Internet  
companies recognize they wouldn’t exist if the scheme the telephone  
and cable companies want to put in place now had existed in the days  
when those companies were just getting started. The successful  
Internet companies of today know that a healthy, vibrant Internet  
benefits everyone.

That's the other view of the world, the one to which I and others  
subscribe. Supporters of equal access to the Internet appreciate the  
technical improvements in the Internet, and realize that telecom  
companies should be able to recoup their investments in the  
architecture of the Internet. But we want these achieved without  
discrimination against users. This is the “Net Neutrality”  
argument. It’s very simple. Companies that own the network should  
not discriminate against services and products in which they do not  
have a financial interest. If one company is able to have access to a  
telephone company or cable service with certain technical advantages,  
such as having its content stored (or cached) close to the consumer  
by a telephone or cable company, then other companies should be able  
to buy the same service.

The legislation to be considered Wednesday in the Commerce Committee  
will give the telecom companies what they want—the appearance of Net  
Neutrality only. The legislation has provisions on net neutrality  
that are weak at best. The legislation only requires that the FCC  
enforce some generally vague and unenforceable principles originally  
conceived as philosophy and not as law. Those principles have a  
significant omission. They say nothing about discrimination by  
service providers. In addition, the legislation restricts the  
Commission to examining net neutrality to a case-by-case complaint  
basis. Normally, when faced with an industry-wide issue like net  
neutrality, the Commission conducts a wide-ranging proceeding called  
a rulemaking, and comes up with an overarching policy. That  
comprehensive approach is prohibited by the legislation.

A band of members of Congress who want to protect the Internet have a  
different vision and proposed strong anti-discrimination methods.  
Reps. Ed Markey, Rick Boucher, Anna Eshoo, and Jay Inslee tried at an  
earlier subcommittee markup to have strong anti-discrimination  
language inserted into the bill. Their effort was not successful. All  
the Republicans but one voted against their amendment, as did six  
Democrats. We hope it will turn out differently this time. We hope  
members of Congress decide the Internet belongs to everyone, not just  
to those who happen to own a network.
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