[Reader-list] Hijacking the net

[Monica Narula]

Apologies for cross posting but i think important to read. What  
starts in the US of course often percolates elsewhere...

best
M
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Nation: Hijacking the Net
    Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 18:52:24 -0500
    From: jchester at pop.starpower.net
      To: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org


Hope all is well.   Here's my small contribution to the "net
neutrality" debate. Nation article below. Please note the
documents from Cisco and others I have placed online.  They are
very revealing of what will happen and how it will work.

My longer version:
http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/JCnetneutrality.html
Documents page:
http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/netneutrality.html


This article can be found on the web at

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester


The End of the Internet?

by JEFF CHESTER

[posted online on February 1, 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
"brandwashing" 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.
==================================
Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054
Phone : + 91 11 23960040
Fax :     + 91 11 23943450
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net