If you’re like me, you love the Internet like you’re a nurturing parent. You’ve watched it grow: from the baby years of dial-up and AOL Instant Messenger to high-speed wireless and high-def video today. But in its adolescence, the open Internet now faces an influential bully: the greedy telecom industry.
The telecom industry has challenged Network Neutrality: the guiding principle of the Internet. Net Neutrality protects our ability to use the Web as we do now: visiting any site, using any application and creating any content we can dream up, from YouTube videos to personal blogs.
The nation’s largest telecoms: AT&T, Verizon and Comcast: want to become the Internet’s gatekeepers.
By violating Net Neutrality, online content can be sped up, slowed down or made unloadable depending on which companies or sites can pay to play: and not on which we like the best.
We’ll wind up with e-toll roads: a Web where companies like Google can afford the fast lane, but people like you and me, and the less wealthy sites we care about, will be stuck in the slow lane.
Sound like the paranoid ramblings of your crazy uncle last Thanksgiving? It’s not. CEOs from these very companies have openly stated their intentions and tested them out. They’ve been trying to undermine Net Neutrality for years, and have only increased their efforts as activists and a handful of lawmakers have pushed to make Net Neutrality an enforceable law, rather than just a guiding principle.
The Web is the economic, democratic and cultural core of our generation. As young people, we stand to gain or lose the most in this fight.
Without Net Neutrality, it is unimaginable that entrepreneurs such as Google, eBay, YouTube etc. would ever have emerged. And where do you fit in? Maybe you have the next great idea for the Web. Nothing should stop you from contributing to our economy, democracy and culture: especially not the greed of a few telecom companies.
The good news? On Sept. 21, both President Obama and Federal Communications Commission Julius Genachowksi committed to pursuing Net Neutrality. This is a huge victory for fans of an open Internet.
Furthermore, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass) has a bill in the House, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, that would make Net Neutrality a law.
The bad news? Now that the telecoms sense that our momentum is building, they are spending millions of dollars on lobbyists and lawyers to destroy Net Neutrality.
They are flooding the FCC with comments about why a “closed” Internet, in which they have the power to discriminate against content for massive profits, is just fine for our country.
A diverse coalition has emerged in support of Net Neutrality and the transformative power of the Internet: including the Christian Coalition, National Rifle Association, ACLU and MoveOn.org. But this isn’t just a movement of organizations; it requires our individual voices. As young people, we cannot afford to sit back and trust others to fight for us.
As young people, we have witnessed the Internet emerge as the heart of our economy, democracy and culture. The Web offers new and vast opportunities for entrepreneurship, free speech, democratic participation and artistic expression.
From the grassroots e-support for Barack Obama, to the vibrant politics and art of the blogosphere, to the smaller victories like “Lolcats,” the Internet has added tremendous value to our society.
With Obama and the FCC Chair on board, and a bill in the House, now is the time to urge your representative to co-sponsor the Net Neutrality bill to protect our open Internet.
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Last summer, Russ Caditz-Peck served as an intern at Free Press, a public interest non-profit dedicated to media reform issues: including protecting and spreading the open Internet.
Russ • Oct 5, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Brett,
Thanks for taking the time to comment–skepticism is more than welcome.
As a college senior cramped for time, I will respond with a quote from last week provided by Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson:
“most opposed to network neutrality have little grasp of how networks actually operate. Google already pays terrific amounts of money for its Internet connectivity; this traffic is passed from network to network until it arrives at a user’s computer and is usually paid for through private, free market mechanisms. There’s no ‘free riding’ here …
Nor is there “free riding” at the customer’s end. The idea that customers are forcing neutrality rules on ISPs and then crushing the poor companies with data is ludicrous; the big players [AT&T, Verizon, Comcast] are making massive amounts of cash, and offering Internet service is hugely profitable. The WSJ asserts that companies like Google have built ‘their business models… on a Web that makes their services appear ‘free’ to users,’ but this is ludicrous, as the profit reports show. Customers pay significant monthly fees for Internet access …
Net neutrality actually encourages the sort of innovation that we want in our networks—higher speeds, open access to innovative new applications and uses—the FiOS model. And everyone can profit from it, including the ISPs. Removing even the threat of such action encourages not innovation but modest speeds, high prices, and discriminatory throttling of user connections.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/editorial-network-neutrality-or-network-neutering.ars
I also appreciate your skepticism regarding money/lobbyists in DC. This is a subject I’ve had some experience with. Here is a graphic from data I compiled this summer while interning at Free Press (which takes no funding from corporations or corporate interests) about how much the telecoms spend on lobbying: http://www.freepress.net/node/62059
More in-depth info on telecom lobbying can be found in this fun lil’ widget: http://www.freepress.net/astroturf
-Russ
Brett Glass • Oct 1, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Russ, the lobbyists for “network neutrality” have been preaching doom and gloom since about 2004. “Regulate now,” they say, or evil ISPs will shut down the Net. And has it happened? Nope. In fact, there are faster speeds, more innovation, more competition, and more widespread deployment than ever. But the lobbyists are tireless, like millennialists who — when their predictions of the end of the world don’t come to pass — just bump the date a few years and soldier on.
Why are those lobbyists so tireless? Because they’re being paid big bucks by big corporations. Google, in particular, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars not only into direct lobbying (they opened a lobbying office in DC and hired a few rather infamous, slimy lobbying firms) but also into “astroturf” groups — groups which claim to be acting in the public interest but toe the Google line because Google gives them big money. It’s even BOUGHT itself a “public interest” group: the New America Foundation. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave the group about 10 million Googlebucks and became its chairman, making the group effectively a Google subsidiary.) Microsoft and Amazon have also been funding the propaganda campaign, though they haven’t put nearly as much money into it as Google.
Big corporations don’t spend that kind of money unless they think there’s something in it for them, and this case is no exception. Google wants to tie the hands of ISPs so that, when it does things that hog bandwidth, the ISPs will be forced to lose money rather than put the brakes on the excessive usage or ask to be paid for their services. It also wants to make sure that ISPs don’t, on behalf of their customers, block Google’s intrusive advertising or ubiquitous tracking cookies. (Google bought Doubleclick, thereby becoming the largest source of tracking cookies — which spy on users — on the Net.) The Google Toolbar likewise spies on users, and they don’t want ISPs helping users to preserve their privacy.
“Network neutrality” regulation would increase the cost of broadband service, decrease quality of service, shut down competitive ISPs (limiting users’ choice of carriers), and kill innovation. Look past the lobbyists’ sales pitches. The Internet has survived for more than a quarter of a century without regulation and shows no signs of problems. Let’s not impose regulation when there’s no problem to solve and when it can only make things worse, not better.