Censored 2012 (57 page)

Consequently, the companies that are now internet gatekeepers are also working for the federal government. This portends increased government cyber-control. While these companies work cooperatively with government in monitoring electronic communications, they do not regularly block content, at least not yet. However, without a clear legal mandate against blocking web content and against unreasonable discrimination, these same corporate gatekeepers will have patently “legal” authority to block, as well as monitor, internet content on behalf of the government. Accordingly, in the present legal context, there is a chilling potential for government censorship and abridgment of First Amendment rights.

If the giant ISPs put their proposed two-tiered pay-for-priority plan into play, citizen journalism will be dead in the water. Smaller news organizations, including individual bloggers, which now cover stories that have been censored or downplayed by the mainstream media, will be relegated to the slow lane, hence unable to compete with giant corporations in the fast lane.

Effectively, these smaller news organs provide a system of checks and balances capable of encouraging some measure of public responsibility among mainstream news organizations. For example, during the Iraq war, the Downing Street memos, which clearly proved that the Bush administration had lied to the American people about its reasons for going to war in Iraq,
¹⁷
at first received scant attention by the mainstream media, including the
New York Times
. However, the internet began to buzz with the story, and eventually this noise got so loud that the mainstream media could no longer ignore it. It still took months before the mainstream media finally covered the story, and even then it was downplayed.
¹⁸

But imagine if small website operators could no longer buzz at an audible decibel. Imagine if these websites were either inaudible or filtered out by the government. The lies and deception of the Bush administration would never have been exposed, even to the extent that they were exposed. Unless we preserve the integrity of the free and open internet, we can look forward to a future in which giant corporations
and their government cronies reap great profits and amass incredible power through deception, lies, and fraud, while all along the citizens of the “free world” remain oblivious to what is going on. The crucial role that net neutrality plays in the survival of democracy can therefore not be understated!

About 86 million people in the US are presently without access to affordable internet, a large percentage of whom cannot afford it.
¹⁹
Only 60 percent of rural households have broadband connections.
²⁰
The US ranked 22nd in 2008 in terms of cost of high-speed internet service, which is cheaper in Portugal and Turkey than in the US. Internet penetration dropped from #4 in 2001 to #15 in 2007.
²¹
The US presently ranks 25th in the world in average internet connection speed. In South Korea, the average download is 10 times faster than in the US. Such slow internet speed can prevent access to many online services and applications.
²²

Yet, despite these disconcerting facts, the giant ISPs want to keep the majority of content providers in the slow lane, thereby making it harder for most Americans to secure quick connectivity to all but the sites run by the wealthy corporate sector. Moreover, it is seeking to do so instead of trying to catch up with other industrialized nations to make broadband internet service faster, more affordable, and accessible to more Americans.

As discussed earlier, the new FCC rules permit ISPs to proportion service fees to amount of usage. This opens the door to even further exclusionary practices by the giant ISPs. Already, these companies have begun to impose usage caps on cable and DSL broadband. For example, AT&T has imposed a 150 GB cap on its DSL users and charges a $10 overage fee for every additional 50 GB.
²³

This trend toward imposing usage fees is likely to become more exclusionary with the introduction of a two-tiered system of fast and slow lanes. This is because major content providers (for example, YouTube) will pass the charges it pays for operating in the fast lane onto their customers. This means that the internet will become a pay-per-view internet much akin to pay-per-view cable television.

In addition to diminishing internet access among the general population, such a plan would seriously impact public institutions such as colleges and universities, which regularly use the internet to teach their curricula. Thus, professors who download information as part of their teaching would be forced to restrict the amount of bandwidth they use in teaching their classes. Students, in turn, who conduct research for writing assignments, would be limited to the amount of information they could afford—which would impact the poorest students. Access to information would become a function of how much money one has and not of how much one wishes to learn.

So how can net neutrality be saved? In August 2010, Verizon and Google teamed up to propose a compromise between net neutrality advocates and the giant ISPs, a proposal that was supposed to allow the latter to control the flow of content while still permitting the former to maintain net neutrality. How so?

The proposal was to create two internets, one that resembled the current public internet and another, a form of private internet. The latter would contain innovative new broadband services such as health care monitoring, educational services, and new forms of entertainment and gaming. This private internet would be a pay-for-play variant of the current internet and thus would be restricted to those who were prepared to pay. Wireless broadband, however, would not be given net neutrality protections because this mode of broadband, according to Google/Verizon, is “too competitive and changing rapidly.”
²⁴

One obvious problem with this proposal is that it would provide an incentive for the giant ISPs to invest in the private internet while leaving the fruits of the public internet to rot on the vine. If all the new technologies end up on the private internet, then in the long run the public version would become an infertile cyber slum, an empty vessel of the robust information highway that it once was. Thus, those who could afford to pay for the innovative new internet would have access to it while those who could not would be relegated to second class citizens.

Moreover, because the new private internet would not be subject to
net neutrality rules, there would be no mechanism to guard against the control of content by government and its corporate cronies. The giant ISPs would have full reign in determining which content providers could operate on the private internet and which content providers could not, and thus the preservation of the democratic flow of information from the many to the many would become a pipe dream.

The answer to the problem of net neutrality is therefore not to restrict its scope to one side of a bifurcated internet but rather to guarantee its application to a unified internet. One way to accomplish this would be for the FCC to pass rules that have legal teeth, which could be done by reinstating the internet’s former common carriage status. As mobile internet continues to expand as a major way in which Americans log onto the internet, net neutrality rules, for mobile as well as fixed internet, against content blocking, filtering, and slowing, and against unreasonable discrimination by ISPs, will need to be clearly articulated and enforced pursuant to the Title II common carriage provisions of the Telecommunication Act.

Another way is for Congress to pass legislation ensuring net neutrality protections. However, the federal government (unfortunately encompassing agencies like the FCC) is presently in alliance with the same companies it is entrusted to regulate. This leaves the American people, along with the realized potential for a free and democratic America, in a serious quandary. If the American people simply sit by and permit their representatives to make decisions regarding the future of the internet, then the prospects are indeed grim for the survival of a free and democratic network.

Most Americans do not want to pay service charges to access the internet and then pay again each time they download information from it. They do not want to wait extended periods of time for their favorite websites to load or time out. Most of us do not want to see the end of the days when a local musician could achieve fame by putting her music online,
or when a small online business could become a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Most of us want to see independent news sources flourish and continue to provide us with the stories that are being censored or downplayed by the mainstream news organizations. Indeed, most Americans want to be able to speak truth to power, to have an uncensored forum by which to make their views known to the masses, and to see free speech and democratic debate thrive on the internet.

So most Americans should be prepared to stand up and be counted for net neutrality. They should, but will they? Many of us think that our own voice alone will not count, so we quietly excuse ourselves from taking an active stand. While we may nod our heads in assent, we retreat when it takes more than a nod to make our views known. But this is an issue that those of us who care about democracy in America—which is the greater majority of us—cannot afford to soft peddle about.

So how can we stand up and be counted? The answer is, by using the free and unfettered architecture of the present internet to have our voices heard before this incredible conduit of democracy is no more. Thus, the adage “use it or lose it” could not be more fittingly applied than here.

The infrastructure for such collective activism on the internet is, to some extent, already in place. For example, Free Press’s
SavetheInternet.com
is composed of “two million everyday people who have banded together with thousands of nonprofit organizations, businesses and bloggers to protect Internet freedom.” This organization sponsors organized citizen campaigns to lobby Congress to save the free internet. However, two million people is a relatively small number of people who could band together to make a difference. What if most Americans who cared about the survival of a free internet were to sign up?

A new organization called Internet Neutrality Freedom Organization (INFO) on Facebook (
facebook.com/info.org
) consists of “friends of a free and democratic internet who are prepared to take a stand against ISPs who want to destroy the open, free, and democratic architecture of the Net.” It seeks to use social media to amass large numbers of people to band together to actively support net neutrality—for example, by organizing boycotts against the ISPs and other showings of unified power against those who seek to undermine internet freedom and democracy. The giant ISPs need internet consumers in order to remain in business. This is where we the people
come in. Together, we can make a difference by standing up to the giant ISPs and letting them know who keeps them in business!

Civil liberties organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (
EFF.org
), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (
EPIC.org
), the American Civil Liberties Union (
ACLU.org
), the Center for Digital Democracy (
DemocraticMedia.org
), and Public Knowledge (
PublicKnowledge.org
) provide opportunities for citizens to support and assist in helping to secure a free and democratic internet. These organizations also help to educate citizens about current events surrounding the attempts by giant corporations to usurp our online freedom. Some of them, such as Public Knowledge, also offer internships for students who want to give their time and energy to helping change the current legal climate surrounding net neutrality and related issues. Thus, each of us can become informed, active participants in the struggle to preserve the free internet.

America is on the precipices of a brave new world in which freedom and democracy may come to be an empty slogan for government and corporate officials who seek money and power through mass manipulation and deception. Without legally enforceable protection of net neutrality, the internet could very likely come under the control of these formidable, megalomaniac powers. The hour is late, and the time is near. We must individually and collectively take responsibility or forever bemoan the demise of the greatest bastion of freedom and democracy ever devised by humankind.

ELLIOT D. COHEN
is a contributor to
Truthout
and
Truthdig
, editor in chief of
International Journal of Applied Philosophy
, ethics editor for
Free Inquiry
magazine, and blogger for
Psychology Today
. His most recent book is
Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).