Congress Is Giving Away the Internet, and You Won’t Like Who Gets It
The Fight for Internet Freedom
Congress is going to hand the operation of the Internet over to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Democrats are helping. It’s a shame. Don’t look now, but the House Commerce Committee next Wednesday is likely to vote to turn control of the Internet over to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner and what’s left of the telecommunications industry. It will be one of those stories the MSM writes about as “little noticed because they haven’t covered it.
Sadly, I’ve been something of a latecomer to the issue of Net Neutrality, despite the best efforts of Sean-Paul Kelley. While the mainstream media (and most of the rest of us) have been sleeping, Congress (the representatives of the People, mind you) is preparing to hand over control over of the Internet to the telecommunications industry. Should this happen, as it appears it will, we will all be the poorer for it as companies like Verizon and AT&T look to leverage their position into maximum profit opportunities. And the freedom that we have all enjoyed- and taken for granted- wil never again exist as we currently now it…because freedom apparently has its price.
Ah…we just LOVE capitalism, don’t we??
On the surface, it may seem a stretch to think that those companies could control the great, wide, infinite Internet. After all, the incredible diversity of the Net allowed everything — Web sites and services of all kinds to exist in perfect harmony. What’s more, they were all delivered to your screen without any interference by the companies that carried the bits to and fro. Until recently, they had to. It was the law. The telephone companies, which carried all of the Web traffic until relatively recently, had to treat all of their calls alike without giving any Web site or service favored treatment over another.
The result was today’s Internet, which developed as a result of billions of dollars of investments, from the largest Internet company that spent millions on software and networking, to the one person with a blog who spent a few hundred dollars on a laptop. The Internet grew into a universal public resource because the telephone and cable companies simply transported the bits.
Last fall, however, the Federal Communications Commission, backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, decided that the high-speed Internet services offered by the cable and telephone companies didn’t fall under that law, the Communications Act. Out the window went the law that treated everyone equally. Now, with broadband, we are in a new game without rules.
Telephone and cable companies own 98% of the high-speed broadband networks the public uses to go online for reading news, shopping, listening to music, posting videos or any of the thousands of other uses developed for the Internet. But that isn’t enough. They want to control what you read, see or hear online. The companies say that they will create premium lanes on the Internet for higher fees, and give preferential access to their own services and those who can afford extra charges. The rest of us will be left to use an inferior version of the Internet.
Admittedly, it hasn’t become a problem yet. But to think it won’t become one is to ignore 100 years of history of anti-competitive behavior by the phone companies. And it was a mere six weeks or so from the time the FCC issued its ill-fated decision to the time when Ed Whitacre, the CEO of (then-SBC) now AT&T issued his famous manifesto attacking Google and other Web sites for “using my pipes (for) free. They don’t, by the way.
What makes this even more sickening is that Congress- our elected representatives- are participating in this giveaway, and will legislate it into existence. The Internet as we know it may well be given away to the like of AT&T and Verizon, who in return will no doubt fatten the campaign coffers of those Congressmen who vote in their favor. And who says that government isn’t for sale?
