The Center for Digital Democracy has put together an elegant explanation of the heightening battle between the telecommunications industry and everybody else that uses the Internet. A lengthy read (for an Internet article), the CDD has outlined what the telcos aim to accomplish and how it affects everything in the future.
The essay, entitled “Life in the Slow Lane: A Guide to the Un-Neutral Net,” focuses on the unresolved Congressional debate over Network Neutrality, a concept slowly manicured, solidified, and defined over the past year, and what exactly a tiered Internet entails.
It means, in short, an Internet much like the cable TV system with which we are familiar: packages of content produced by providers or by provider affiliates, organized according to pricing models, with access controlled by telco and cable behemoths like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast.
The results:
1. Competition is nullified
2. Deep pockets prevail over shallow pockets
3. The Craigslists and Googles of the future can’t get a foothold
4. Information and content is controlled, guided.
5. End users and content providers pay more, and pay more often
If permitted, access providers will divide access into packages resembling basic cable and subsequent upgrades to premium “unlimited” packages (which are not really unlimited). Content providers will have to pay premiums to get their content to the public, rather than the sweep of user-generated content, cheaply and easily disseminated on aggregate sites like YouTube.
The CDD’s most chilling prediction:
Over half of the Web’s estimated 600-plus billion pages derive from nonprofit sources. With the cable-telco duopoly’s plans for tiered access (i.e., charging content providers for guaranteed high-speed delivery), all of that noncommercial content, along with perhaps three-fourths of commercial programming whose producers either cannot or will not pay the operators’ extortionate rates, will be squeezed onto the digital equivalent of a dirt road.
Traffic on this last vestige of the erstwhile “public” Internet will move at a crawl, leaving most users with little alternative than to turn to broadband’s new private, premium lanes, where Network Neutrality is no longer the rule of the road.
This makes sense considering the past. Think per-minute packages for cellular phones, where peak minutes, text data transfer charges, pay-per-transmission schemes prevail. What “cable-telco duopoly” has in mind is pay-per-email, pay-per-view, pay-per-upload, pay-per-download, pay-per-thought, pay-per-keystroke.
And there’s a lot of money in such schemes, which is a clue to why these industries are fighting so hard and spending so much lobbying Congress to get their way.
To review Murdok coverage on the Net Neutrality issue, click here.
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