What makes the Internet revolutionary is that it is democratic, open to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. That could soon change.
As In These Times went to press, the House was setting to vote on the “Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) Act of 2006,” a bill written by the telephone and cable TV corporations. Among other provisions, the act formally guts what is known as the First Amendment of the Internet—”network neutrality.”
“Net neutrality ensures that the public can view the smallest blog just as easily as the largest corporate Web site and prevents companies like AT&T from rigging the playing field for only the highest-paying sites and services,” says Timothy Karr, the campaign director for Free Press, a media reform organization.
By not including network neutrality protections, the COPE Act upholds a 2005 ruling from the Federal Communications Commission that allows Internet service providers—telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon and cable companies like Comcast—to charge Web content creators a fee to make their sites readily accessible.
For example, take a filmmaker who wants to produce a documentary and distribute it to the public on his Web site. Under this new legislation, a service provider like AT&T would be able to charge the filmmaker for making his content available to their customers. Or, if AT&T did not approve of the documentary, it could refuse to let its customers access it all together—thereby allowing corporate censorship of a medium now characterized by the freewheeling exchange of ideas. In effect, the legislation allows the telecom industry to become the tollbooth operator on the information superhighway. The Internet will begin to look like cable TV, where viewers can only choose from available options.
SavetheInternet.com puts it this way: “The Internet has always been driven by innovation. Web sites and services succeeded or failed on their own merit. Without net neutrality, decisions now made collectively by millions of users will be made in corporate boardrooms.”
NOTE: SavetheInternet has a petition you can sign and send to congress. One caution, copy the text you write before sending, some in congress do not use WEB mail and you must paste your text into their form.
The COPE law is a way to take the internet outside the laws that govern our phone system. The laws governing our phone system have the appropriate protections for users.
To clarify, COPE allows Internet providers to restrict access to their lines from other Internet providers. It permits (example) Verizon to restrict user Internet access only to Verizon services, blocking access to/from AT&T/SBC. This is in contrast to our phone system where Verizon cannot restrict phone calls to a AT&T phone.
In addition, there is no protection against corporate censorship on what goes though their lines. Protections, such as child pornography, is the province of the court system not corporations.
The actual goal of COPE is greed driven. For the big Internet providers it is not enough to charge individuals for connection/access, they want to charge WEB sites for just access. Stress access, they already charge for hosting (maintaining the site's files) WEB sites.
Example: They want to be able to charge BarbariansAtTheGate.COM, whose WEB site may be maintained by AT&T, for access through Verizon.
So, what do you think is going to happen to Joe-Highschooler's WEB Site? Can he afford the fees to allow access to his site worldwide? Or how about (fictitious) WeHateBush.ORG site? Think a big Internet provider supporting Bush is not going to restrict access, minus protection in Internet law?
Internet law should use our phone system law as the model. Provide user access protections to maintain a open and free (as in freedom) Internet.
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