Will the most egalitarian of all modern inventions — the Internet (and, by extension, the World Wide Web) — become just another "them who has it, gets it" medium?
That’s the possiblity posited by New Yorker financial page writer James Surowiecki.
Surowiecki’s piece ran in the March 20, 2006, issue of the magazine, which makes it hardly a topic of burning immediacy, but I’m a little behind in my New Yorker reading and the possibility that Internet providers might — and would like to — charge companies who use their services more for better quality bandwidth, caught my attention.
As Surowiecki describes it, a bandwidth provider, e.g. AT&T or Comcast, establishes a system of tiered access. Pay more, get better bandwidth, your customers (viewers of your Web site, purchasers of products sold via your Web site) don’t have to wait as long for a page to download/don’t get cut off in the middle of browsing/buying/etc.
In effect, the bandwidth providers would become, as Surowiecki puts it, self-appointed gatekeepers. "Decisions that once were made collectively by hundreds of millions of Internet users would now be shaped in large part by a handful of telecom executives."
If this had been the system from the beginning, he says, the Internet would almost definitely not be the humming hive of seemingly infinite variety and egalitarianism that it is today:
The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it’s been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them — blogs, say, or Wikipedia — can become influential. If the Internet turns into a zone of tiered access, it will be harder for noncommercial sites or startup companies to compete with bigger firms.
Curious to see if the subject of "net neutrality" was still in the news, I did a little searching, coming first across this Google groups discussion sparked by Surowiecki’s piece.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a Wikipedia entry, although I was surprised by its length, the number of links (including several referencing political activity around the subject, and a whole collection linking to academic papers), and by the fact that it was last updated yesterday, Nov. 23 — Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S.
According to Wikipedia’s multitude of authors, the subject has attracted the attention and support of such disparate entities as MoveOn.org, the Christian Coalition of America, and Google.
There’s also a link to a Web site called Save the Internet, which informs me (not literally) that I must have had my head buried in the Sahara somewhere, because this topic is a hot political button right now, with all the hallmarks of great political stories of old: corruption, big money players, little folks losing out.
Here’s what a Nov. 20 post on Savetheinternet.com has to say:
The revolving door of congressional staffers-cum-industry lobbyists is a part the same corruption of our democracy that has become loathsome to voters.
The phone and cable lobby is a major player in this scheme. In the past 10 years, telecommunications, broadcasting and cable companies have spent more than half a billion dollars on campaign contributions, political action committees, PR firms and high-spending lobbyists to push through self interested policies.
These regulations – offering massive tax breaks, relaxed ownership rules, and unfettered control of the public airwaves and broadband markets — all came at the public’s expense.
On the issue of Net Neutrality, companies like AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Comcast outspent public interest advocates on a scale of 500 to 1 – pushing Congress to remove the longstanding nondiscrimination rules that enabled the Internet to become the greatest vehicle for free speech and economic innovation.
Stay tuned, I’ll be posting more about this.
