Mirth-and-Matter-bloggers beware: your days of unbridled internet access may be coming to a close. Three of the major players in our digital era--Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T--have all announced that they have plans to put 'caps' on their clients' bandwith usage requiring high-bandwith users to pay an additional fee. They argue that this "internet metering" will restrict so-called "bandwidth hogs"(who tend to slow down internet connections for others) and in turn, will mitigate internet usage for all of its clients. Read the full story here.
Surely Internet providers (and their corresponding business model-spewing economists) have come to terms with population projection in the digital era. As more people are downloading, blogging and youtubing, a commodity has emerged that capitalism has yet to exploit to its full potential...well, until now. The internet is undeniably the dominating force behind globalization and its potential for generating money is enormous. Perhaps part of the reason globalization is taking place at such an accelerated rate is due to the internet's increasing availability abroad. Whether or not internet providers are hiding behind a false facade-claiming that they are moderating internet usage for its clients, facilitating the internet on equal terms--is not for me to decide(perhaps only suggest). One needs only to look at the history of American corporatocracy to see that we will manipulate any commodity to serve our capitalistic needs--here or abroad.
I think of the internet as a public resource such as a library--you pay a monthly fee which provides you unlimited access to the library's collection. Should people who check out more books be expected to pay more than others? Don't certain jobs require the use of books more than others? The Internet providers' contention is that the more people check out books, the more congested the library line becomes and hence, the slower the process. Unfortunately, this is an assesment I can't necessarily refute.
Perhaps this whole issue comes down to a basic philosophical distinction: I see the internet as a basic right; the internet providers, a privilege.
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4 comments:
Agreed. I think college ethernet networks have created a whole generation of people who view the internet as a right instead of a privilege.
The privatization and consolidation of media is a story that should cause much more alarm than it does. Unfortunately, the people who would share that story are the media companies, targets of the story themselves.
We've lost radio, television, and to a large degree print sources to media consolidation. The internet is really the last free area.
It probably will remain free as well, since it is so decentralized. The problem, as you pointed out, is not that corporations dictate content (like TV, etc) but that they dictate access.
Maybe it only starts with charging a different price for people who use a certain bandwidth. That is something that can be justified in terms of return on investment, etc.
But where does it stop? Once you lose the idea of the internet as public forum and replace it as a commodity just like any other, then any control on the part of the corporation is justified. Here are two links which show a disturbing future:
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/10/19/comcast/index.html
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/09/comcast/index.html
The silver lining is that my sense (I have no data on this of course) is that internet users are probably more willing to go to that mat over these types of issues then radio or tv users were in the past. For one we have seen what has happened to those mediums. Also, unlike radio and tv, the internet is largely created by us. We'll fight to keep what's ours.
D'oh, links were too long.
Here they are:
http://tinyurl.com/4cf6ye
http://tinyurl.com/6cyvv3
On one hand, the telecoms have a point - why should I, who use the internet all day shuffling around huge files, pay the same amount as my next door neighbor who just uses her computer to read emails from her grown children? In some way, she is subsidizing my bandwidth-intensive job.
But, as Chris points out, this is a slippery slope, and changing the parameters of this issue is tantamount to calling into question the underlying principle of access and freedom that is at the heart of the internet's role in daily life.
Once we the public accept that bandwidth is a commodity that is held and manipulated by corporate interests for the sake of profit, there is no going back.
Look at the radio. During the 1920s, a public debate was waging about what to do with the finite resources of spectrum space (the pre-digital version of bandwidth). On one side you had the companies, who wanted to treat spectrum like just another product to be bought and sold; on the other hand, you had individuals who believed that something so significant to the education of the masses was a public resource and should not be controlled by private interests. Of course, we all know who won this debate.
If we turn these rights over to Comcast and the other guys, I fear that we will be setting a dangerous precedent on an information stream whose power and scope social scientists and economists are just beginning to understand.
I have two observations about this issue:
1. If you open service providers to charge based upon usage of bandwidth it will only be a matter of time until the Postal Service will be allowed to put a stamp tax on email.
2. It would be an absolute shame to limit something that is, at its heart, entirely concerned with the transmission of information. Tim Berners Lee invented the modern internet, not for personal gain, but so he and other scientists could share their findings instantaneously and in a format that could handle large text files and esoteric scientific notations. In that sense this issue is like Microsoft trying to acquire Linux (for those who aren't familiar, Linux is a powerful, open-sourced, freeware operating system designed to give users the utmost control over their computers).
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