connecting the dots

Mon Dec 13 23:33:13 CET 2010

On Net Neutrality, the Internet, and Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.

(A blogpost.)

http://hannahmiller215.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/netneutralityorangejuice/

Last week, the United States government moved to block and restrict speech
on many of the largest Internet companies in the United States, including
social media, online document storage, e-commerce systems, domain-name
registrars – levels of the Internet that the vast majority of users don’t
know existed.

Under pressure from Congress, the State Department, and the Department of
Homeland Security, Paypal (87 million users) shut down online
payments<http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/paypal-suspends-wikileaks-account/>
to
Wikileaks, Amazon
kicked<http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon>
all
quarter-million documents off their servers, and Columbia University
students were told by State Department
officials<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/04/state-department-to-colum_n_792059.html>
to
stop talking about Wikileaks on Twitter (190 million users) and Facebook
(500 million users).

It was a major, international freedom of speech crackdown; Reporters without
Borders <http://en.rsf.org/wikileaks-hounded-04-12-2010,38958.html> said
that “the United States … has suddenly brought their policies on freedom of
expression into line with those of China.”

Meanwhile across town, Federal Communications Commission chair Julius
Genachowski made a
speech<http://www.openinternet.gov/speech-remarks-on-preserving-internet-freedom-and-openness.html>
touting
the federal government’s support of freedom online:

>From the Chairman’s speech:

*“The Internet has been an unprecedented platform for speech and democratic
engagement, and a place where the American spirit of innovation has
flourished.*

We’ve seen new media tools like Twitter and YouTube used by democratic
movements around the world.

*If we want the Internet to be free and open around the world — and, for
global peace and prosperity, we do – we must ensure its freedom and openness
here at home.”**
*
It’s hard to imagine a greater moment of cognitive dissonance in American
Internet policy than what happened last week, and what’s even worse, these
two debates were regarded in most coverage and public conversation as not
being part of a much bigger picture.

What is called the “net neutrality” or Open Internet proceeding at the FCC –
basically a civil liberties debate about whether freedom of speech and
assembly should apply to commercial Internet carriers – was far overshadowed
this week by the actions of the U.S. government, which demonstrated its
absolute willingness to disrupt and censor the multiple other planes of
operation that make up the Internet as we know it without apparently any of
the due process protections that cover a Spring Break DUI checkpoint.

Regardless of how you feel about the content of Wikileaks, the actions taken
by the federal government were the beginning of a new era and a new
conversation about what freedom of the Internet really means, when American
Internet activists and the Internet policy world is going to need to start
taking government censorship as seriously as they have taken commercial
censorship, and broaden the scope and meaning of “net neutrality.”

Unfortunately, we’re not exactly starting from a strong point. Getting even
the most basic First Amendment protections applied to carriers has been a
long and difficult campaign (even when it’s in carriers’ self-interest to
provide the maximum amount of content!), and now it appears that the FCC is
going to take civil liberties protection OFF of the part of the Internet
where innovation can actually happen – the wireless devices which are the
focus of incredible software and media development.

This is the single most widely understood and politicized Internet policy
issue in America, something with pretty much universal implications for
every other part of American society, but the FCC (like most other
regulatory agencies) has apparently spent far more of their
time<http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/10/12/02/damning-praise-genachowskis-plan>
meeting
with the people they are supposed to be policing rather than the people on
whose behalf they regulate.

The Open Internet proceeding – according to press reports – has contained in
it a far more possibly damaging policy decision: the apparently unexamined
idea that usage-based pricing for information is exactly like usage-based
pricing for any other commodity. Is a meter on information really the same
as your electric meter?

This seems on its face to be quite a big assumption. Do we have any evidence
to show that information, as a commodity, behaves the same way and has the
same economic and social impact as water or petroleum? Do we even know
enough about it? You can consume a lot of water for four years and your
house will be really clean and you will be really hydrated; if you consume a
lot of information for four years, you could come out of it with an
educational credential that will alter the rest of your career, income,
productivity, not to mention changed social costs of having a more educated
population. Information consumption has longer lasting effects than turning
on the gas during winter.

The Internet is a radical shift in the use and availability of information
as a commodity akin to the shift to fossil fuel use in the 19th century was
for energy policy; it took over one hundred years for us to even detect the
cumulative effect of this (global warming) and it will take the policy world
another 100 years to come up with solutions. In a country where one of our
most valuable economic assets is our higher education system, in the country
that basically invented the Information Age as we know it, is the FCC really
going to allow meters on the Internet with less study than the feds
regulate frozen concentrated orange juice
futures<http://www.cftc.gov/anr/anrcontractsdesig98.htm>
?

At the end of the day, though, those of us who really believe in the open
Internet and the good old First Amendment are going to have to seriously
consider how we are going to protect the darn thing from those with the
power of search, seizure, and arrest. The carriers will be fine; they’ve
been beating back the FCC with their flotillas of lobbyists and lawyers
since the days of Franklin Roosevelt; what worries me is the
security/surveillance/defense apparatus raiding new, emerging Internet
companies like a massive SWAT operation dropping down on a dusty attic full
of ham radio enthusiasts.

Amazon is *the world’s largest bookseller*, and a major distributor of most
other digital and print media, from movies to MP3s to eBooks, and it took
them about 48 hours to cave into government pressure.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation had this to
say:<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks-first-amendment-only-strong>

*“…a web hosting company isn’t the government. It’s a private actor and it
certainly can choose what to publish and what not to publish. Indeed, Amazon
has its own First Amendment right to do so. That makes it all the more
unfortunate that Amazon caved to unofficial government pressure to squelch
core political speech. Amazon had an opportunity to stand up for its
customer’s right to free expression. Instead, Amazon ran away with its tail
between its legs.”*

The Open Internet proceeding is going to ramp up again December 21, but at
this point, Julius Genachowski’s stand on civil liberties has been proven to
be fairly beside the point by the rest of the federal government. What’s
even more amazing, the parts of the Internet industry that were touched by
this government crackdown have nothing to do with the FCC or the
Communications Act; as time goes on, more and more of our real
communications system is going to be outside of the realm of the FCC, which
already has difficulty getting people to take the bunny ears off their TVs.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation <http://www.eff.org/> has written a great
deal more about the implications for the future, and policy ideas that could
bring the Internet back squarely in the realm of protected speech. There are
a number of organizations now running online petitions about Wikileaks and
the discussion for privacy, security, surveillance, etc is very lively. I do
not want to minimize the work that has been done on net neutrality in the
past, but I do think the time has arrived when the definition simply must be
expanded to include a much more complicated world.

<http://hannahmiller215.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/netneutralityorangejuice/>

-- 
Hannah Miller
hannahmiller.net
215-888-8036

-- 
http://www.deepdishwavesofchange.blogspot.com
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=109520517858965396132.00048838d78b7d003adb8
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