Cosmic Paradigm Newsletter ALERT
By Mark Kimmel
February 9, 2006
It was only a matter of time before those who would control
us found ways to stifle the Internet. Proposals circulating would not do away
with it altogether; just make it expensive and subject to the old forms of mind
control. For me, the Internet has been a source of truth to combat the
incessant messages of the media. The probability of change in its open access,
of placing tolls and/or taxes on it, kept me awake last night.
This may well be the last shoe to drop. If I am to get all
my information from broadcast media or an occasional book, then my horizons dim
considerably, and I become more susceptible to the numbing techniques of mind
control. If my information can be prescribed by the powers that be, then I will
more willingly submit to whatever crumbs are offered.
When I couple this with all the other control techniques I
have learned of these past few months, I see this latest as merely part of the
insidious scheme to deny any spark of freedom in humanity. Now, like every
other human innovation, it will be brought under control and used as a means of
collecting additional money and control into the hands of the few. And make no
mistake, these aims are not contrived exclusively on this planet; our human
controllers are but puppets.
Read the following proposals carefully. If you come out
where I did, contact your elected representatives and any news media. Tell them
you do NOT want the basic character of the Internet constrained. Make an issue
of this before it is too late.
In Truth and Love,
Mark Kimmel
P.S. I know that I am sending out a lot of information right
now, however I feel a sense of urgency as the screws are tightening.
----
The End Of The Internet
By Jeffrey Chester, The Nation
Posted on February 6, 2006, Printed on February 6, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/31753/
The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are
crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and
nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that
would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.
Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and
other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and
store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and
marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency.
According to white papers now being circulated in the cable,
telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets --
corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers -- would get
preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on
our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable,
such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or
simply shut out.
Under the plans they are considering, all of us -- from
content providers to individual users -- would pay more to surf online, stream
videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription
plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing
"platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of
Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams
or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.
To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable
lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the
nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit
them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private
networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the
Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering
proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Ten
years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996,
telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to
convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a
turbo-charged digital retail machine.
The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than
the cable industry about its strategy for the Internet's future. Senior phone
executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the
delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies.
As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told
Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies
have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage
or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"
The phone industry has marshaled its political allies to
help win the freedom to impose this new broadband business model. At a recent
conference held by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank funded by
Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other media companies,
there was much discussion of a plan for phone companies to impose fees on a
sliding scale, charging content providers different levels of service.
"Price discrimination," noted PFF's
resident media expert Adam Thierer, "drives the market-based capitalist economy."
Net Neutrality
To ward off the prospect of virtual toll booths on the
information highway, some new media companies and public-interest groups are
calling for new federal policies requiring "network neutrality" on
the Internet. Common Cause, Amazon, Google, Free Press, Media Access Project
and Consumers Union, among others, have proposed that broadband providers would
be prohibited from discriminating against all forms of digital content. For
example, phone or cable companies would not be allowed to slow down competing
or undesirable content.
Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that
we care about -- civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair
elections -- will be further threatened by this push for corporate control.
Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if major political
advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that ads from
Democratic and Republican candidates were more visible and user-friendly than
ads of third-party candidates with less funds.
Consider what would happen if an online advertisement
promoting nuclear power prominently popped up on a cable broadband page, while
a competing message from an environmental group was relegated to the margins.
It is possible that all forms of civic and noncommercial online programming
would be pushed to the end of a commercial digital queue.
But such "neutrality" safeguards are inadequate to
address more fundamental changes the Bells and cable monopolies are seeking in
their quest to monetize the Internet. If we permit the Internet to become a
medium designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and personal
consumption, rather than global civic-related communications, we will face the
political consequences for decades to come. Unless we push back, the "brandwashing" of
Why are the Bells and cable companies aggressively advancing
such plans? With the arrival of the long-awaited "convergence" of
communications, our media system is undergoing a major transformation.
Telephone and cable giants envision a potential lucrative "triple
play," as they impose near-monopoly control over the residential broadband
services that send video, voice and data communications flowing into our
televisions, home computers, cell phones and iPods.
All of these many billions of bits will be delivered over the telephone and
cable lines.
Video programming is of foremost interest to both the phone and
cable companies. The telephone industry, like its cable rival, is now in the TV
and media business, offering customers television channels, on-demand videos
and games. Online advertising is increasingly integrating multimedia (such as
animation and full-motion video) in its pitches. Since video-driven material
requires a great deal of Internet bandwidth as it travels online, phone and
cable companies want to make sure their television "applications"
receive preferential treatment on the networks they operate. And their overall
influence over the stream of information coming into your home (or mobile
device) gives them the leverage to determine how the broadband business
evolves.
Mining Your Data
At the core of the new power held by phone and cable companies
are tools delivering what is known as "deep packet inspection." With
these tools, AT&T and others can readily know the packets of information
you are receiving online -- from e-mail, to websites, to sharing of music,
video and software downloads.
These "deep packet inspection" technologies are
partly designed to make sure that the Internet pipeline doesn't become so
congested it chokes off the delivery of timely communications. Such products
have already been sold to universities and large businesses that want to more
economically manage their Internet services. They are also being used to limit
some peer-to-peer downloading, especially for music.
But these tools are also being promoted as ways that
companies, such as Comcast and Bell South, can simply grab greater control over
the Internet. For example, in a series of recent white papers, Internet
technology giant Cisco urges these companies to "meter individual
subscriber usage by application," as individuals' online travels are
"tracked" and "integrated with billing systems." Such
tracking and billing is made possible because they will know "the identity
and profile of the individual subscriber," "what the subscriber is
doing" and "where the subscriber resides."
Will Google, Amazon and the other companies successfully
fight the plans of the Bells and cable companies? Ultimately, they are likely
to cut a deal because they, too, are interested in monetizing our online
activities. After all, as Cisco notes, content companies and network providers
will need to "cooperate with each other to leverage their value
proposition." They will be drawn by the ability of cable and phone
companies to track "content usageā?¦by
subscriber," and where their online services can be "protected from
piracy, metered, and appropriately valued."
Our Digital Destiny
It was former FCC chairman Michael Powell, with the support
of then-commissioner and current chair Kevin Martin, who permitted phone and
cable giants to have greater control over broadband. Powell and his GOP
majority eliminated longstanding regulatory safeguards requiring phone
companies to operate as nondiscriminatory networks (technically known as
"common carriers"). He refused to require that cable companies, when
providing Internet access, also operate in a similar nondiscriminatory manner.
As
But now, the phone companies are lobbying
Besides their business interests, telephone and cable
companies also have a larger political agenda. Both industries oppose giving
local communities the right to create their own local Internet wireless or wi-fi networks. They also want to eliminate the last
vestige of local oversight from electronic media -- the ability of city or
county government, for example, to require telecommunications companies to
serve the public interest with, for example, public-access TV channels. The
Bells also want to further reduce the ability of the FCC to oversee
communications policy. They hope that both the FCC and Congress -- via a new
Communications Act -- will back these proposals.
The future of the online media in the
If Americans are to succeed in designing an equitable
digital destiny for themselves, they must mount an intensive opposition similar
to the successful challenges to the FCC's media ownership rules in 2003.
Without such a public outcry to rein in the GOP's corporate-driven agenda, it
is likely that even many of the Democrats who rallied against further
consolidation will be "tamed" by the well-funded lobbying campaigns
of the powerful phone and cable industry.
Jeffrey Chester is
executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy (www.democraticmedia.org ).
© 2006 Independent
Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/31753/
---
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