<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#5899BD" face="Arial" size="5"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><B>A Democratic Internet</B></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://www.tompaine.com/search/index.cgi?search=Art%20Brodsky&IncludeBlogs=1&SearchFields=keywords&Template=author"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><B>Art Brodsky</B></SPAN></FONT></A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><B>April 25, 2006</B></SPAN></FONT></DIV><BR><IMG src="cid:344649AE-76FF-467D-BBE3-CEE0149322D2@local"><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><I>Art Brodsky is communications director for </I></SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/04/25/www.publicknowledge.org"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#5899BD"><I>Public Knowledge</I></FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><I> , a public interest group working at the intersection of information and technology policy. </I></SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><B>Right now, you’re reading </B></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><B><I>TomPaine.com</I></B></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> 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 </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><I>TomPaine.com</I></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> —or any website—needs (technically speaking, of course) are computers, servers and access to the Internet.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.<BR></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> 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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P></BODY></HTML>