Posts Tagged ‘net neutrality’

As the Internet continues to increase in influence in commerce, education and politics, the sweeping changes it is making are challenging incumbent institutions and policies. The constitutive moment in which we find ourselves is one which comes once a generation as new communicative technologies take hold. But if one thing has become clear to me while reading the history of former revolutions in communications, it is that technological progress and development is not determined; political decisions will influence the future of communications just as much as ones of technology.

Public Knowledge is a D.C.-based organization which works to protect individual rights in the digital world. They do amazing work to promote balanced intellectual property law, net neutrality, open access and a host of other issues which require an intimate knowledge of both law and code. In a post today, they make an important point: the online environment is under fire from forces who would shape it in their distorted image. “Make no mistake. The Net’s Roots are under as much stress and attack as is the real-world environment. The glaciers cracking and the ozone layer growing and temperatures rising in the real world all have their equivalent in the online environment.” I don’t think it is a coincidence that some of the brightest minds pondering the Internet are recognizing the parallels between the environmental movement and the movement for an open net; just last week I wrote about Ronald Deibert’s similar essay calling for a defense of the global communications environment.

Are we, then, making the political choices which enable the desired future? Forget about politics as it is practiced (though that is important). Instead, think about it as the affairs of power. Will we empower all or few? Will creativity, expression and action in a digital world be open equally to all or will political choices limit our future before we even recognize it?

If anyone understands the threat to an open digital future, it is the folks at Public Knowledge who mention net neutrality, privacy, broadband limitations and draconian copyright. I would add internet censorship and the digital divide as problems which need to be overcome. These challenges have been fought for years now, but the battle remains uphill. Take a moment to donate to the EFF and PK to enable them to enable us all.

I’m currently reading Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media” and have run across some great quotes which I thought I’d share.

“In regard to the critical issues of monopoly, free expression, and individual privacy, the advent of the telegraph posed new problems for which nineteenth century American thought and institutions were unprepared. Americans had typically conceived of monopoly as originating in political and legal privilege. They did not have established legal principles and policies for dealing with monopolies such as Western Union that emerged in the market and by the time that framework emerged during the Progressive era, the diffusion of the telephone was already eroding the telegraph’s monopoly position. Similarly, Americans had generally believed that the way to preserve freedom of the press was to protect the press from the federal government; their ideas and experience had not prepared them to deal with a private monopolist and a new medium of communication. As newspapers and other businesses came to depend on the telegraph, state and federal law at first offered them only limited protection against discrimination by Western Union. In 1894, the Supreme Court declared that telegraph companies were “bound to serve all customers alike, without discrimination,” but the Court refused to categorize the companies as “common carriers,” like railroads. It was only in 1910, in amendments to the Interstate Commerce Act, that Congress defined telegraph and telephone companies unambiguously as common carriers, required to accept messages from any customer willing and able to pay. American concerns about individual privacy, reflected in the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure, had also focused on infringements by government, not by private corporation. Nineteenth-century law did not extend to the telegraph either the protection of individual privacy or the commitment to popular access to service that postal policy had provided.

In short, while Americans developed the telegraph early and fast, they did so without translating into a new technological context the underlying principles embodied in the First and Fourth Amendments and the postal system. The popular movements that upheld these principles did not have the political power in the late nineteenth century to overcome the institutional interests that early decisions about the telegraph had allowed to develop.”

More than a decade into the Internet age, are we updating our institutions and legal framework to embrace the potential? Or are incumbent interests going to continue to decide the future? More than a century since the telegraph showed that private corporations have the same abilities as government, do we recognize that the intermediaries of the net exert incredible amounts of control over our basic rights, freedoms and actions?

I’m currently reading Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media” and have run across some great quotes which I thought I’d share.

“In regard to the critical issues of monopoly, free expression, and individual privacy, the advent of the telegraph posed new problems for which nineteenth century American thought and institutions were unprepared. Americans had typically conceived of monopoly as originating in political and legal privilege. They did not have established legal principles and policies for dealing with monopolies such as Western Union that emerged in the market and by the time that framework emerged during the Progressive era, the diffusion of the telephone was already eroding the telegraph’s monopoly position. Similarly, Americans had generally believed that the way to preserve freedom of the press was to protect the press from the federal government; their ideas and experience had not prepared them to deal with a private monopolist and a new medium of communication. As newspapers and other businesses came to depend on the telegraph, state and federal law at first offered them only limited protection against discrimination by Western Union. In 1894, the Supreme Court declared that telegraph companies were “bound to serve all customers alike, without discrimination,” but the Court refused to categorize the companies as “common carriers,” like railroads. It was only in 1910, in amendments to the Interstate Commerce Act, that Congress defined telegraph and telephone companies unambiguously as common carriers, required to accept messages from any customer willing and able to pay. American concerns about individual privacy, reflected in the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure, had also focused on infringements by government, not by private corporation. Nineteenth-century law did not extend to the telegraph either the protection of individual privacy or the commitment to popular access to service that postal policy had provided.

In short, while Americans developed the telegraph early and fast, they did so without translating into a new technological context the underlying principles embodied in the First and Fourth Amendments and the postal system. The popular movements that upheld these principles did not have the political power in the late nineteenth century to overcome the institutional interests that early decisions about the telegraph had allowed to develop.”

More than a decade into the Internet age, are we updating our institutions and legal framework to embrace the potential? Or are incumbent interests going to continue to decide the future? More than a century since the telegraph showed that private corporations have the same abilities as government, do we recognize that the intermediaries of the net exert incredible amounts of control over our basic rights, freedoms and actions?

As part of the Publius Project, a Berkman Center effort soliciting essays on “constitutional moments on the Net,” Lewis Hyde has published a brilliant essay equating the Founders’ support for the free exchange of ideas with net neutrality.

Hyde relates the story of a visiting evangelical minister who was banned from preaching at congregations when his message became opposed to the resident clergy. Benjamin Franklin, appalled, founded what would become the University of Pennsylvania to foster a venue for freedom of expression. To Franklin, as to the ancient Greeks, freedom of speech wasn’t enough – it needed its counterpart: freedom of listening. If a dissenting minister or activist or politician could not gain access to the audiences he sought, the Founders recognized that the democracy would falter.

In much the same vein, Hyde contends that the Founder would have understood discriminatory telecommunications networks as aligned with tyranny.