Thursday, December 18, 2003
Warning on Future of the Internet
Basic freedoms are at stake here. Freedom to speak. Freedom of the press. Watch carefully.
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps writes in Monday's Mercury News:
I think Chairman Powell's heart is in the right place, and I wish I had a warm and fuzzy feeling when he talks about market forces. But I don't. Talk about "market forces" implys that there's a market, and it may not be possible to have a market in Layer 1 connectivity. A duopoly is not a market. Today, where markets exist at all in the Layer 1 telecom infrastructure, they are vulnerable and small compared to monopoly power and the distortionist forces of regulation.
I do not think that any of the Commissioners have a clear line on Internet openness. We're going to have to watch this very closely and work hard to understand what's going on in our names.
Essential further reading:
Everything by Lawrence Lessig
Steve Levy's recent Newsweek essay.
John Walker's Digital Imprimateur
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps writes in Monday's Mercury News:
Proponents of eliminating non-discrimination rules claim that allowing dominant broadband providers to build walls around the Internet is just "deregulating'' and "letting the market reign supreme,'' deploying the rhetoric of Libertarianism to serve decidedly parochial interests.Right on! On the other hand, Copps is also the guy at the FCC's VOIP hearing who said, "Leave no stakeholder behind," which, to me, translates into, "Make sure that the incumbents get theirs."
*snip*
Think about what could happen if your broadband provider could discriminate. It could decide which news sources or political sites you could view. It could prevent you from using children's Internet filtering technology that it didn't sell or that filtered out its own Web sites. It could prevent you from using spam-jamming programs to block its spam. It could impose restrictions on the use of virtual private networks by telecommuters and small businesses to keep them as paying customers of the public network. It could limit access to streaming video to protect its core content business. Sound far-fetched? It's already beginning to happen.
If we continue down this path, the basic end-to-end openness that made the Internet great will be gone. Control will have been turned over to those who control the bottlenecks, just like Ma Bell controlled them in the heyday of its monopoly.
I think Chairman Powell's heart is in the right place, and I wish I had a warm and fuzzy feeling when he talks about market forces. But I don't. Talk about "market forces" implys that there's a market, and it may not be possible to have a market in Layer 1 connectivity. A duopoly is not a market. Today, where markets exist at all in the Layer 1 telecom infrastructure, they are vulnerable and small compared to monopoly power and the distortionist forces of regulation.
I do not think that any of the Commissioners have a clear line on Internet openness. We're going to have to watch this very closely and work hard to understand what's going on in our names.
Essential further reading:
Everything by Lawrence Lessig
Steve Levy's recent Newsweek essay.
John Walker's Digital Imprimateur
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