My latest Guardian column, Internet service providers charging for premium access hold us all to ransom, explains what's at stake now that the FCC is prepared to let ISPs charge services for "premium" access to its subscribers. It's pretty much the worst Internet policy imaginable, an anti-innovation, anti-democratic, anti-justice hand-grenade lobbed by telcos who shout "free market" while they are the beneficiaries of the most extreme industrial government handouts imaginable.
The FCC promised a fix, and here it is: FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, an Obama appointee and former cable lobbyist, has drawn up rules to allow ISPs to decide which communications you can see in a timely, best-effort fashion and which services will be also-ran laggards. In so doing, Chairman Wheeler sets the stage for a further magnification of the distorting influence of money and incumbency on our wider society. Political candidates whose message is popular, but who lack the budget to bribe every ISP to deliver it in a timely fashion, will be less equipped to reach voters than their better-financed rivals. A recent study looked at 20 years' worth of US policy outcomes and found that they exclusively responded to the needs of the richest 10% of Americans. Now the FCC is proposing to cook the process further, so that the ability of the ignored 90% to talk to one another, network and organise and support organisations that support their interests will be contingent on their ability to out-compete the already advantaged elite interests in the race to bribe carriers for "premium" coverage.
If you think of a business idea that's better than any that have come before – if you're ready to do to Google what Google did to Altavista; if you're ready to do to the iPod what the iPod did to the Walkman; if you're ready to do to Netflix what Netflix did to cable TV – you have to start out with a bribery warchest that beats out the firms that clawed their way to the top back when there was a fairer playing-field.
The FCC and its apologists will shrug and say that the ISPs are businesses and they own their lines and can do what they want with them. They'll say that we can't expect the carriers to invest in next-generation networks if they can't maximise their profits from them.
But this is nonsense. The big US carriers are already deriving bumper profits from their ISP business, while their shareholder disclosures show that they're making only the most cursory investment in new network infrastructure (Americans have been waiting for fast "fiber-to-the-kerb" connectivity for decades, mostly what they're getting is "fiber-to-the-press-release" puff pieces from ISPs who gull uncritical reporters into repeating their empty promises of fast networks, just around the corner).
Internet service providers charging for premium access hold us all to ransom [Cory Doctorow/The Guardian]
(Image: Evidence A: The Ransom Note, Jared and Corin, CC-BY)
