NET NEUTRALITY: A NECESSARY PRINCIPLE FOR MAINTAINING GLOBAL DEMOCRATIC STANDARDS

THE OPEN INTERNET IS A FORCE FOR DEMOCRACY & OPEN GOV'T, NOW IT IS UNDER THREAT FROM THOSE WHO WISH TO BOTTLENECK THE FREE PRESS

The concept of 'net neutrality' refers to the current state of affairs in the free democracies of the world, where those who control the physical infrastructure of the Internet are not allowed to police its content or to charge for provider-user access. It is a vital ingredient in the make-up of the Internet, because it guarantees the freedom of information that makes the web so useful to free society and so valuable to those who do well what works in that open environment.

But the US House of Representatives last year voted to end net neutrality with the COPE Act (Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement). The language of COPE would permit major telecommunications companies to control what content their subscribers would be allowed to see. It would allow them to charge content-providers for 'visibility', or for speed of bandwidth, favoring not the most interesting material or the most thorough of reporters, but rather the wealthiest corporations in the media game.

The result would be: independent voices would be nearly stamped out by major players; bloggers would not be able to compete with major sites like Yahoo! or MSN, which would (one imagines) easily be able to pay the extra 'bandwidth access' fees the telecoms would assess; information would suffer from a 'mainstreaming' effect, whereby all prominent sites routinely feed the same language, taken from the sames sources, into the same type of news content, marginalizing more analytical or academic materials; the Internet would belong to the ISPs and not to its users, be they content-creators or end-users.

Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) has pointed out in hearings on the Senate floor that the 'Bell companies' had "literally nothing to do with" creating the internet. AT&T even enjoy the unique distinction of refusing to participate in its creation. They already charge at both ends of the Internet experience: both end-users and content-providers have to pay access fees to have a connection to the world wide web, which, incidentally, has been the most profitable area of the telecom sector over recent years.

The direct effect of any legislation permitting the currently prohibited practice of stratifying bandwidth to direct pre-paid content to more users would be to 'bottleneck' the free press. The First Amendment to the US Constitution specifies that: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Any law permitting the constraint of the freedom of access of people connecting to the Internet to information available across its fibers would be a very direct abridging of the freedom of speech and of the press.

The Internet has allowed the 'press', i.e., all media whereby information is distributed from those in the know to the People, to expand its freedom to unprecedented levels. This has been good for all involved, has helped involve ordinary citizens in the political process, has helped create unimaginable profits for business, has created a new digital economy where freedom of information is a basic foundational component. To create an Internet bottleneck, where all traffic is partitioned into the (minority) high-priced high-speed service and the (vast majority) marginal, slower-access fibers, is to squeeze the vast new digital media culture into a space that cannot adequately serve its needs.

Net neutrality is the only way we can know that there are not more dirty tricks being played by political figures whose ideas we do not share, the only way we can ensure that research that is helpful to all people, but is poorly funded, be available to those in a position to use it for the good, the only way we can be sure that information which would not fit the predetermined 'official' chronicle of events be able to surface and play its necessary role in public life.

In short, without net neutrality, the Internet is just cable television with a very limited visual landscape and a slower pace. And cable television suffers from one fatal flaw: everything is bought and paid for, leaving nearly zero room for any content of a strictly humanitarian or civic nature. A free society needs that information to exist, and ours has not only created the platform to allow for it inexpensively and on a vast scale, but we have adjusted to the digital realm in such a way that we now require the Internet to maintain that type of information flow. [s]