While Republicans in the U.S. House have been noisily repealing health insurance reform; while unemployment and foreclosures are daily issues for too many Americans, and while hateful talk is a backdrop to runs on ammo at Wal-Mart, there is a "stealth issue" that could trump them all.
The Corporate Takeover and Privatization of the Internet does not show up on the radar for most Americans. However, for voters who seek a full range of opinions and for candidates who do not have big money, for startup entrepreneurs and small businesses, the Internet is all they have.
A free and open people's Internet goes hand in hand with democracy. In fact, the Internet is the last level playing field.
This level playing field is about to be tilled up by the giant telecoms, aided by congress members they sponsor. While this may be the free speech issue of our time, it is still in a "stealth" zone because we short-sighted, easily distracted Americans are not feeling any immediate pain---the Internet is working fine as it is now.
Besides, what kind of issue is "Net Neutrality" to bring passion among the populace and lure web surfers off their couches? As a tag "Net Neutrality" does not sound particularly sexy or inflammatory, or it sounds like something that is overly nuanced and would take too much time and too many brain cells to ponder.
Nuance is not needed to get this issue, nor is tech geekiness. It is simple: Either the government oversees the Internet for the good of the public, or the government hands it over to the few, giant Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Either free speech and the First Amendment win, or Wall Street wins.
Net neutrality allows any individual, regardless of net worth or other measure of status or position, to go anywhere on the web for information. Likewise, every one of us can post our message and opinions on the Internet, putting us on equal footing with millions-making CEOs.
The pain for the public will set in later. With Wall Street and the CEOs' stock options in charge, costs will skyrocket. The flow of information will not be an open and international spigot---it will have the ISPs straining and parsing the content with only corporate profits as their guiding star
The ISP Cartel could put up expensive barriers to entry for startup businesses and political aspirants. They could make favored opinions move more quickly. They could censor news they did not like.
If AT&T were class action-sued for cheating customers, for instance, how much of that news do you think AT&T would allow to flow through its pipes? Or more ominous, since Comcast now owns NBC, MSNBC and CNBC and TV and radio stations across the country, how much play would a negative story about Comcast get on the NBC Nightly News or any other NBC-related outlet?
Print journalism has been gutted in the U.S. With increasing consolidation of corporate control over the Internet, and with news media ownership becoming concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few, the Internet could turn into Fox News.
At best, the Internet will become as toothless and corporate as broadcast TV, with its low-brow, low-budget "reality" entertainment…with its "infotainment" division as hard-hitting as a Katie Couric rant about photos of "Glee" actors in their underwear.
The ISP Cartel will push a political agenda to maintain the congress members they have purchased to protect their profits. Dissent will be down; censorship will rule. They will tell us how to think and vote, but, hey, they will still let us know what Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are doing as that stuff mushes our brains.
Do you like to get your news from CNN or MSNBC and not Fox? If Rupert Murdoch or other extreme political interests buy their way into the Internet as has been done with television, radio and newspapers, Faux News may somehow load faster than others or may be the only choice.
Do you like Facebook or YouTube? The ISPs will charge "protection money," a la Tony Soprano, as a double-dip fee to keep our favorite sites moving fast. Oh, and they will know the web sites we like by snooping on our transmissions, just as if someone opened every piece of snail mail we received before delivering it.
Do you like to Skype? Use Vonage or Magic Jack for long distance calls? Those competitors of the phone and cable companies will cost more, and may be driven out of business, after the Internet is privatized.
Using technology similar to what the Chinese government uses to effect censorship, Comcast in 2007 was caught secretly cutting off the connection between consumers and Netflix, which competes with Comcast for movie viewers.
The imminent trouble is that the usual suspects are plotting to game the Internet to Wall Street's liking, and as usual, the public be damned. The scheme is familiar and relentless: one more piece of what is in the public interest gets twisted into what is in Wall Street's interests.
Last month a private sector lobbying entity, the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, held a "State of the Net" conference in Washington. While wining and dining Washington lawmakers, the event sponsors put on a program that sounded less like "advice" and more like a pep rally for the corporate interests who would wrench the Internet from the public's slipping grasp. That Tennessee's 7th District Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn was the keynote speaker---she who would privatize Social Security and the Internet and de-fund Medicare and public education--- and that AT&T, Comcast, Google and Microsoft were the event's "Platinum Sponsors," is all you need to know.
Blackburn's speech was followed by a session called, "Congress, Technology and the Tea Party."
A preview of fear-mongering could be found in the titles of some of their breakout groups: "The State of the Social Net---A Catalyst for Civil & Political Revolution or a Hyped Distraction?" And, "Can the U.S. Continue to Support a Free Global Internet in the Age of Wikileaks, Cyberwar and Rampant Copyright Piracy?"
Blackburn has introduced a bill (HR 96) in the House of Representatives which hands the Internet over to the giant telecoms and forbids the Federal Communications Commission from touching one byte of the Internet. By the way, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon and other industry related political action committees have contributed more than a quarter million dollars to Blackburn's PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Blackburn sits on the Communications, Technology and Internet Subcommittee in the House. According to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by Citizens for a Free and Open Internet PAC, Blackburn's political campaign committee and her WEDGEPAC received $278,035 from major Internet stake-holders from June 7, 2002 through Nov. 22, 2010. The single largest contributor was wireless kingpin Verizon through its political action committees with $44,035 donated, although AT&T and BellSouth combined contributed $58,500.
AT&T re-bought BellSouth, a formerly divested Baby Bell, in 2006. FEC records show AT&T's PAC donated $42,500 and BellSouth's PAC contributed $16,000 to Blackburn. Next were the National Cable and Telecommunications Association PAC with $35,000 and Comcast with $21,000. Other contributors among major stake-holders in how the burgeoning Internet evolves and is regulated included Time Warner, Viacom, Yahoo and General Electric, which owns NBC, which just became Comcast.
Those totals do not include donations from individuals. The numbers do not include many Blackburn contributors which have a stake in the Internet but which are not so close to Internet transmission, such as the Recording Industry Association of America, Warner Music Group and other music industry and various business corporations and associations.
Total of all donations from corporate and other PACs was $2,612,085 over the same time frame, making the Phone, Cable, TV and Internet PACs represent about 10.64% of all contributions.
Unfortunately for the people, we don't have highly paid lobbyists, and the FCC as the people's "lobbyist" has a wimpy record recently on sticking up for the public interest. A December swipe at net neutrality left loopholes wide enough that Verizon could drive through a truck load of lobbyists.
In another letdown of the public interest and an appeasement of corporate interests it is supposed to regulate, the FCC just approved Comcast's acquisition and merger with NBC-Universal to form an unthinkable, vertically integrated monopoly. (Will somebody please dust off the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and send it to Washington?)
Comcast, the nation's largest ISP and cable provider, now owns a vast catalog of NBC's movies, productions, content and other assets. Will Comcast push its own and more profitable content ahead of others? Of course, and further, they will say they have a duty to shareholders to do so.
Comcast's merger approval was less than three days old when MSNBC ratings leader Keith Olbermann, who espoused a progressive view and regularly shamed Fox News types for lying, was removed from his position.
The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. possessions.
In the future, video, radio, telephone and other connections will all go through the Internet, and most of that will be wireless. Most Americans only have one or two choices now for receiving Internet---the phone company or the cable company. The lack of competition that we already have has caused the U.S. to drop to 15th or worse in the world in per capita broadband adoption, and bandwidth speed in the U.S. also lags yet costs more.
President Obama's campaign promise that "we will take a back seat to no one" in maintaining an open and widely accessible Internet rings hollow now that the FCC has made its shallow statement on Net Neutrality only after weeks of secret meetings with AT&T and Comcast lobbyists.
Leading up to the FCC's Dec. 21 "fake neutrality" order, the major corporate players had been spending a reported $700,000 a day to lobby Congress and the FCC. According to The Washington Post, "Over the past three years more than 150 organizations hired at least 118 outside lobbying groups to influence the outcome of the (FCC's) vote."
Don't the people need their cop on the beat to oversee the giant corporations who seek first to please Wall Street? The giant telecoms have zillions of dollars for advertising and lobbying, and they have the best legislators money can buy. Have we forgotten the enduring effects of the financial meltdown that came from lack of regulation, and then led to "socialized" (bailouts for investment bankers) losses?
Google started in a garage. Facebook started in a dorm room. What if those startups had not had access to relatively cheap messaging on the Internet? It is the entrepreneurs and small businesses that drive employment in the U.S.; the large corporations and multinationals are rewarded by Wall Street when they lay off workers or cut costs by shipping jobs off-shore.
The Internet was developed by the U.S. government, beginning in the Eisenhower years after Russia's Sputnik made U.S. leaders fearful that they were getting beat in technological advances. The military used it first, and then UCLA researchers, funded by a federal grant, made the Internet suitable for public consumption.
We taxpayers funded the development of the Internet. We provided AT&T and the like with billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks to extend service outside of densely populated cities. We charged AT&T and Verizon nothing to dig up public rights-of-way to put in their lines. Our phone bills each month contain a "Universal Service Fee," which is supposed to help the telecoms pay for extending service to virtually all Americans.
Regular Americans paid for the Internet. We expect to keep it.
The Internet is rightly an American product that belongs to Americans. It is truly the people's Internet in its ownership, in its equality, in its equal rights for all to the same level of free speech. America's unique spirit of free enterprise and a chance for everyone to make it is embodied in the Internet like it is nowhere else.
Here is where we draw the line in the sand. The fight for free speech on an open Internet is democracy's last stand. Blackburn and the corporate thugs will have to pry this laptop from my cold, dead hands.
This is no less an issue than health care or education or Social Security or anything else; it is more of an issue because this goes to the heart of what is truly our No. 1 issue: corporate takeover of our entire political system and electoral process.
With the Supreme Court paving the way for secret, unlimited domestic and foreign contributions to decide our elections, campaign finance and election reform is the No. 1 issue. Nothing positive and major will get done by Congress on this or any other issue until government is back in the hands of the people.
This is not just any issue. This is every issue. Internet Equal Rights is both a proxy for and copy of every other issue, such as health insurance reform. The playbook is the same, the players are the same, and the basic issue is the same---who runs the country.
Do you like your Internet as it is now? Snap to it and raise Cain with your representative and senator to put the public first. The Constitution still reads, "We, the People," not, "We, the Fortune 500." Do not let us get steamrolled by another corporate lying and fear-mongering campaign. Nothing less than the future of democracy is in the balance.
Link to Citizens for a Free and Open Internet PAC: www.WhatsUpWithMarsha.com
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