The PDA Guerrilla: Net neutrality and freedom of speech

The ongoing battle over Net Neutrality and the attempt of several large U.S. ISPs to provide preferred access status to some Internet service providers and otherwise restrict what their subscribers can access over the Internet entered a new phase recently with the ruling of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia overturning the proposed FCC rules allowing such prioritization and Comcast's promise (under pressure) to work with Bit Torrent to solve traffic congestion issues caused by downloads of very large files. I want to be very clear about this upfront: While I appreciate the problems of the ISPs and know what it is like to have service slow to a crawl due to teens overloading the network with downloads, net neutrality is nothing less than a freedom of speech/freedom of the press issue. This is not just some private companies making rules to run their businesses better. The Internet is often the ONLY place today where people can get vital information, including important news. And for an increasing number of people (including myself) it is the primary medium for gaining news and information.

For example, while the other electronic media are busy providing "news" about the latest sexual foibles of various prominent politicians and celebrities, I learned about the reappearance of Depression-style migrant camps in California, populated by families and retirees who have lost their homes in the sub-prime mortgage disaster presently sweeping the country, when writer/editor Susie Bright posted on it on her Web site.

Since 9/11 we have seen a huge erosion in the quality of the news and information provided by traditional media. Reporters more concerned about getting invited to the "right" Washington parties than in questioning the statements of the White House about the Iraq War and other major issues, statements that all too often have turned out to be inaccurate at best and outright lies at worst, have let America down. Often it has been bloggers and other Internet-based publications that have raised those issues most effectively. The Internet has provided a forum in which all sides can present their views, while the traditional media increasingly reflects the opinions of a very few media giants who now dominate radio and TV and who tend to work hand-in-glove with Washington.

Certainly the ISPs have problems. The demand for file downloads, and particularly uploads, has hugely exceeded the planning expectations. When I lived in an inner suburb of Washington, D.C., I did not try to do anything online on Saturday mornings. My shared cable network link was just too overloaded with what I presume were large file downloads by the neighborhood teens and tweens to allow me even to access email. And the ISPs are feeling squeezed economically and have a hard time finding capital to upgrade those last-mile networks. While some network giants such as Amazon.com and Google seem to be making billions, ISPs struggle in a commoditized market. But selling premium access to exactly those rich service providers, and in the process effectively controlling what their subscribers can access, is bad for everyone, whether that censorship is undertaken for political or economic reasons. It hurts the ISPs and the Internet in general. It is exactly the huge diversity of services, information sources, and viewpoints that are threatened by this proposal that drives the Internet phenominon. To a large extent, the Internet is the hugest collection of niche markets in history, and restricting that will hurt everybody, including the very giants that would seem to benefit from it. If the Internet is limited to just those giants, it will lose its attraction for large numbers of users, use will fall off and most people will go back to what they know best. Most of all it will hurt those users themselves, who will lose their last major source of a wide diversity of news and opinion.

One of the FCC's most important criteria in changing regulations has always been whether adequate diversity of sources of diverse opinion and competition exists. For many people, including myself, cable is the only available high-speed Internet alternative, and today the reality is that dial up is just not fast enough to support reasonable Internet use. Too much important information is contained in videos (remember the "Makaka" video of the last election which resulted in a Republican Congressman losing his seat in Republican Virginia) and other large files that must be downloaded to be seen. On many sites, just shopping requires high speed access today.

Too often in recent years, "freedom of speech" has been equated with the super rich and large corporations spending or donating large amounts of money to support political campaigns and lobbying efforts. The U.S. cable industry has seen its own major shakeout in the last few years, leaving a very few cable and wire-line telephone companies in control of Internet access for a huge percentage of the U.S. population. If these companies are then allowed to determine what sites their subscribers can and cannot access easily (or at all), they will have tremendous power. If that is not an effective restriction of free speech by basically cutting access to all of those diverse voices out there on the Internet, then I do not know what would be. When countries like The PRC try to restrict the choices their people have on the Internet, we scream about basic human rights. But when an oligarchy of cable operators proposes to do essentially the same thing, the FCC seriously entertains the idea. If the FCC allows the cable companies to create classes of Internet access, essentially, the U.S., once "the home of the brave and land of the free", will become the home of the frightened and land of the controlled.