| lcs Mixmaster Remailer 2006-04-24, 8:06 am |
| Go to Original http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/29086
Congress Is Giving Away the Internet,
and You Won't Like Who Gets It
By Art Brodsky
TPM Cafe
Saturday 22 April 2006
Congress is going to hand the operation of the Internet over to AT&T,
Verizon and Comcast. Democrats are helping. It's a shame.
Don't look now, but the House Commerce Committee next Wednesday is
likely to vote to turn control of the Internet over to AT&T, Verizon,
Comcast, Time Warner and what's left of the telecommunications industry. It
will be one of those stories the MSM writes about as "little noticed"
because they haven't covered it.
On the surface, it may seem a stretch to think that those companies
could control the great, wide, infinite Internet. After all, the incredible
diversity of the Net allowed everything Web sites and services of all kinds
to exist in perfect harmony. What's more, they were all delivered to your
screen without any interference by the companies that carried the bits to
and fro. Until recently, they had to. It was the law. The telephone
companies, which carried all of the Web traffic until relatively recently,
had to treat all of their calls alike without giving any Web site or
service favored treatment over another.
The result was today's Internet, which developed as a result of
billions of dollars of investments, from the largest Internet company that
spent millions on software and networking, to the one person with a blog
who spent a few hundred dollars on a laptop. The Internet grew into a
universal public resource because the telephone and cable companies simply
transported the bits.
Last fall, however, the Federal Communications Commission, backed by
the U.S. Supreme Court, decided that the high-speed Internet services
offered by the cable and telephone companies didn't fall under that law,
the Communications Act. Out the window went the law that treated everyone
equally. Now, with broadband, we are in a new game without rules.
Telephone and cable companies own 98% of the high-speed broadband
networks the public uses to go online for reading news, shopping, listening
to music, posting videos or any of the thousands of other uses developed
for the Internet. But that isn't enough. They want to control what you
read, see or hear online. The companies say that they will create premium
lanes on the Internet for higher fees, and give preferential access to
their own services and those who can afford extra charges. The rest of us
will be left to use an inferior version of the Internet.
Admittedly, it hasn't become a problem yet. But to think it won't
become one is to ignore 100 years of history of anti-competitive behavior
by the phone companies. And it was a mere six weeks or so from the time the
FCC issued its ill-fated decision to the time when Ed Whitacre, the CEO of
(then-SBC) now AT&T issued his famous manifesto attacking Google and other
Web sites for "using my pipes (for) free." They don't, by the way.
Here's the inside baseball: A couple of weeks ago, a courageous band of
legislators tried to stop the madness in Subcommittee. Ed Markey, Rick
Boucher, Anna Eshoo and Jay Inslee proposed some good language to protect
the Internet. For their troubles, they just got four more votes, other than
theirs. Just three Democrats, other than the sponsors, voted for it. Only
one Republican voted for it. When we talk about special interest giveaways,
this one will be at the top of the list. And we won't have only Republicans
to blame.
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