Re: NBC: It won't be long now... Goodbye the Internet

It would be a perfect way to control the media. Imagine if you could
only read or watch what was available on the newstand or on TV?




In article <1139094541.015886.16250@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"the q is silent" <james.c.wagner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The scariest thing about this: i can't really imagine any prominent
Democrats taking a stand against this kind of thing.

I wonder how successful such attempts will be. Certainly a majority of
Americans are idiot sheep who gladly pay through the nose to have their
Internet activites monitored and regulated, but there are enough
renegade tech nerds out there who could stand to become the new giants
if they came forward with "common carrier" type services. They would
need a hell of a lot of capital to get things of the ground of
course...

-Jyqm

The Left Rev. New Guy wrote:
The End of the Internet?
By Jeff Chester
The Nation

Wednesday 01 February 2006

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are
crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform
the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a
privately run and branded service that would charge a fee
for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications
giants are developing strategies that would track and store
information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast
data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which
could rival the National Security Agency. According to white
papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and
telecommunications industries, those with the deepest
pockets - corporations, special-interest groups and major
advertisers - would get preferred treatment. Content from
these providers would have first priority on our computer
and television screens, while information seen as
undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be
relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us - from
content providers to individual users - would pay more to
surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry
planners are mulling new subscription plans that would
further limit the online experience, establishing
"platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access
that would set limits on the number of downloads, media
streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or
received.

To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and
cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to
further weaken the nation's communications policy laws. They
want the federal government to permit them to operate
Internet and other digital communications services as
private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental
oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals
that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future.
Ten years after passage of the ill-advised
Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable
companies are using the same political snake oil to convince
compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet
into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.

The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid
than the cable industry about its strategy for the
Internet's future. Senior phone executives have publicly
discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the
delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet
content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T,
told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed
to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense,
because we and the cable companies have made an investment,
and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to
use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

The phone industry has marshaled its political allies to
help win the freedom to impose this new broadband business
model. At a recent conference held by the Progress and
Freedom Foundation, a think tank funded by Comcast, Verizon,
AT&T and other media companies, there was much discussion of
a plan for phone companies to impose fees on a sliding
scale, charging content providers different levels of
service. "Price discrimination," noted PFF's resident media
expert Adam Thierer, "drives the market-based capitalist
economy."

Net Neutrality

To ward off the prospect of virtual toll booths on the
information highway, some new media companies and
public-interest groups are calling for new federal policies
requiring "network neutrality" on the Internet. Common
Cause, Amazon, Google, Free Press, Media Access Project and
Consumers Union, among others, have proposed that broadband
providers would be prohibited from discriminating against
all forms of digital content. For example, phone or cable
companies would not be allowed to slow down competing or
undesirable content.

Without proactive intervention, the values and issues
that we care about - civil rights, economic justice, the
environment and fair elections - will be further threatened
by this push for corporate control. Imagine how the next
presidential election would unfold if major political
advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that
ads from Democratic and Republican candidates were more
visible and user-friendly than ads of third-party candidates
with less funds. Consider what would happen if an online
advertisement promoting nuclear power prominently popped up
on a cable broadband page, while a competing message from an
environmental group was relegated to the margins. It is
possible that all forms of civic and noncommercial online
programming would be pushed to the end of a commercial
digital queue.

But such "neutrality" safeguards are inadequate to
address more fundamental changes the Bells and cable
monopolies are seeking in their quest to monetize the
Internet. If we permit the Internet to become a medium
designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and
personal consumption, rather than global civic-related
communications, we will face the political consequences for
decades to come. Unless we push back, the "brand-washing" of
America will permeate not only our information
infrastructure but global society and culture as well.

Why are the Bells and cable companies aggressively
advancing such plans? With the arrival of the long-awaited
"convergence" of communications, our media system is
undergoing a major transformation. Telephone and cable
giants envision a potential lucrative "triple play," as they
impose near-monopoly control over the residential broadband
services that send video, voice and data communications
flowing into our televisions, home computers, cell phones
and iPods. All of these many billions of bits will be
delivered over the telephone and cable lines.

Video programming is of foremost interest to both the
phone and cable companies. The telephone industry, like its
cable rival, is now in the TV and media business, offering
customers television channels, on-demand videos and games.
Online advertising is increasingly integrating multimedia
(such as animation and full-motion video) in its pitches.
Since video-driven material requires a great deal of
Internet bandwidth as it travels online, phone and cable
companies want to make sure their television "applications"
receive preferential treatment on the networks they operate.
And their overall influence over the stream of information
coming into your home (or mobile device) gives them the
leverage to determine how the broadband business evolves.

Mining Your Data

At the core of the new power held by phone and cable
companies are tools delivering what is known as "deep packet
inspection." With these tools, AT&T and others can readily
know the packets of information you are receiving online -
from e-mail, to websites, to sharing of music, video and
software downloads.

These "deep packet inspection" technologies are partly
designed to make sure that the Internet pipeline doesn't
become so congested it chokes off the delivery of timely
communications. Such products have already been sold to
universities and large businesses that want to more
economically manage their Internet services. They are also
being used to limit some peer-to-peer downloading,
especially for music.

But these tools are also being promoted as ways that
companies, such as Comcast and Bell South, can simply grab
greater control over the Internet. For example, in a series
of recent white papers, Internet technology giant Cisco
urges these companies to "meter individual subscriber usage
by application," as individuals' online travels are
"tracked" and "integrated with billing systems." Such
tracking and billing is made possible because they will know
"the identity and profile of the individual subscriber,"
"what the subscriber is doing" and "where the subscriber
resides."

Will Google, Amazon and the other companies successfully
fight the plans of the Bells and cable companies?
Ultimately, they are likely to cut a deal because they, too,
are interested in monetizing our online activities. After
all, as Cisco notes, content companies and network providers
will need to "cooperate with each other to leverage their
value proposition." They will be drawn by the ability of
cable and phone companies to track "content usage...by
subscriber," and where their online services can be
"protected from piracy, metered, and appropriately valued."

Our Digital Destiny

It was former FCC chairman Michael Powell, with the
support of then-commissioner and current chair Kevin Martin,
who permitted phone and cable giants to have greater control
over broadband. Powell and his GOP majority eliminated
longstanding regulatory safeguards requiring phone companies
to operate as nondiscriminatory networks (technically known
as "common carriers"). He refused to require that cable
companies, when providing Internet access, also operate in a
similar nondiscriminatory manner. As Stanford University law
professor Lawrence Lessig has long noted, it is government
regulation of the phone lines that helped make the Internet
today's vibrant, diverse and democratic medium.

But now, the phone companies are lobbying Washington to
kill off what's left of "common carrier" policy. They wish
to operate their Internet services as fully "private"
networks. Phone and cable companies claim that the
government shouldn't play a role in broadband regulation:
Instead of the free and open network that offers equal
access to all, they want to reduce the Internet to a series
of business decisions between consumers and providers.

Besides their business interests, telephone and cable
companies also have a larger political agenda. Both
industries oppose giving local communities the right to
create their own local Internet wireless or wi-fi networks.
They also want to eliminate the last vestige of local
oversight from electronic media - the ability of city or
county government, for example, to require
telecommunications companies to serve the public interest
with, for example, public-access TV channels. The Bells also
want to further reduce the ability of the FCC to oversee
communications policy. They hope that both the FCC and
Congress - via a new Communications Act - will back these
proposals.

The future of the online media in the United States will
ultimately depend on whether the Bells and cable companies
are allowed to determine the country's "digital destiny." So
before there are any policy decisions, a national debate
should begin about how the Internet should serve the public.
We must insure that phone and cable companies operate their
Internet services in the public interest - as stewards for a
vital medium for free expression.

If Americans are to succeed in designing an equitable
digital destiny for themselves, they must mount an intensive
opposition similar to the successful challenges to the FCC's
media ownership rules in 2003. Without such a public outcry
to rein in the GOP's corporate-driven agenda, it is likely
that even many of the Democrats who rallied against further
consolidation will be "tamed" by the well-funded lobbying
campaigns of the powerful phone and cable industry.


--


_____________________________________________________
"A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has
destroyed itself from within." - Will Durant

.

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