Chekhov’s Mistess

Don’t Take the Internet for Granted

Jeff Chester’s article in The Nation’s “The End of the Internet?” (February 1, 2006) is so full of quotables it’s hard to choose just one. In fact, as of right now, there are over 250 blogs posting on it.

Here’s why:

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets—corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers—would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Summing up, Chester says:

But now, the phone companies are lobbying Washington to kill off what’s left of “common carrier” policy. They wish to operate their Internet services as fully “private” networks. Phone and cable companies claim that the government shouldn’t play a role in broadband regulation: Instead of the free and open network that offers equal access to all, they want to reduce the Internet to a series of business decisions between consumers and providers.

Here are some links from the article:

White papers from Democraticmedia.org

Free Press

hearusnow.org

Common Cause

Progress and Freedom Foundation

Consumersunion.org

There’s also been an ongoing discussion of these issues at the blog of The Future of the Book.

Also see Who Will Control the Internet? (Nov/Dec 2005) by Kenneth Neil Cukier at Foreign Affairs magazine. His article is not about commercial control, but political control:

Any network requires some centralized control in order to function. The global phone system, for example, is administered by the world’s oldest international treaty organization, the International Telecommunication Union, founded in 1865 and now a part of the UN family. The Internet is different. It is coordinated by a private-sector nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was set up by the United States in 1998 to take over the activities performed for 30 years, amazingly, by a single ponytailed professor in California.

The controversy over who controls the Internet has simmered in insular technology-policy circles for years and more recently has crept into formal diplomatic talks. Many governments feel that, like the phone network, the Internet should be administered under a multilateral treaty. ICANN, in their view, is an instrument of American hegemony over cyberspace: its private-sector approach favors the United States, Washington retains oversight authority, and its Governmental Advisory Committee, composed of delegates from other nations, has no real powers.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: February 05, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:0
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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