Will your grandchildren someday lament their difficulties affording the cost of maintaining access to a wide variety of networked content and services? Will you? The answer lies with us, the netizens of today. We can take responsibility for protecting our freedoms, or we can stand aside and witness the erosion of ‘network neutrality’. If we fail to organize a coordinated consumer advocacy movement, the Internet’s founding principles of openness and fair and equal access will exist only in history books.

Today’s web is a paradise for the competition of new ideas. In recent years the variety and depth of content, applications, and services has exploded tremendously. Unfortunately, the lessons of the past tell us that this phenomenon is an anomaly; a freak occurrence that is as much as likely to evaporate as it was unlikely to have occurred in the first place. To appreciate the fragility of the web as it exists today you might imagine what it would be like as a physical invention that you could buy at any Wal-Mart down the street.

You might say that as a real-world object, the Internet would be something like a magic pill that gives you perfect memory and global telepathic superpowers. As more people from around the world obtain it, the value of obtaining it would continue to escalate until the cost of going without it in the developed world becomes unbearable. But something is very special about the particular combination of abilities that such a pill would offer; this is what futurists call a disruptive technology.

Such a pill would contain within it the power to enable the consumers of the world to destroy the applicability of intellectual property laws. Unable to regulate in the realm of telepathy, the world’s largest corporations would crumble as we force their business models into permanent obsolescence. In the real world there will never be a pill like this. But as an analogy, the idea closely resembles the power of the Internet today. The only major fundamental difference is that information in the real world must flow along physical conduits; pathways owned and regulated by the same enormous corporations whose profits the Internet’s content-liberating power endangers.

Here in the real world, these companies have lobbied aggressively to enact a growing body of legislation that seeks to put the genie back in the bottle. The DMCA was their first victory in their fight to push for laws to prevent us from inspecting and reporting upon our own personal property. In coming years they will advance their cause by aiming to lock down our freedoms with mass produced CPUs bearing unique encryption keys to thwart the proliferation of knowledge that can defeat the flaws within their security scheme; all to keep you from seeing and hearing what you haven’t paid to experience. Yet, as scary as these trends may be, the ugliest threat to the future of human potential has yet to surface.

The disease that threatens to spoil our paradise can’t be cured by black market hardware and brave geeks with university equipment toiling away at the forbidden innards of nanoscopic circuitry. Our true enemy is the greed of executives at companies like AT&T and Verizon. Telecoms that control the fiber optic networks of the world wield an awesome power over the advancement of technology. In fact, the future of knowledge itself is dependent upon the amazing properties of the light that these companies steward. They have spent billions in a race to strap the world around us with bundles of thin tubes of internally mirrored glass; and the race is far from over. At the same time they’re aggressively funding the efforts of the world’s smartest scientists to develop the technology to transmit ever larger chunks of data within increasingly narrow segments of the color spectrum.

If knowledge is power, what is the power to transmit the light that brings us knowledge? What does it mean to own these strands of glass and divide the light so that it can only be known to those who pay the price? In short, the power of infrastructure trumps all others because he who routes the photons will write the rules of tomorrow’s world. If these corporations have their way, the coming age of the so-called ‘Knowledge Society’ will more closely resemble a society of ignorance.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google fame understand this. And apparently Verizon Communications got the memo as well. Verizon lobbyists in Washington, D.C. are working overtime as of late in a push to fast track their plans for a national fiber optic network to deliver “Video on Demand”-over-IP service in competition with the cable companies. So far, they claim to have reached 3 million homes, and by the end of 2006 they aim to double that figure. But these figures are just a drop in the bucket compared to the penetration of cable broadband. So their latest move in this ambitious effort involves touting this broadband delivered video service as a cure to the high costs of cable.

Apparently, they feel that in return for a chance to alleviate our cable bill woes our Congress critters in D.C. ought to cut them a path through the red tape by reforming the existing cable franchise approval process. And they’ve also been lobbying state-by-state to win legislation that allows them to offer IP-based telecommunications services without being subject to the classification of “public utility”; a distinction that lowers their costs. Their savings comes at the expense of risky low income neighborhoods and rural areas where building out a fiber network is cost prohibitive.

Verizon’s mission to establish fiber-based telecommunications services in competition with the cable giants is only one prong of their grand strategy. Their other goal is to dismantle what John Thorne, Verizon’s senior vice president and deputy general counsel, calls “Google utopianism”. This little gem of a sound bite refers to our ability to pay only once in order to access the bandwidth intensive websites we’ve come to depend on. Their plan to dismantle our “utopia” begins in designating portions of the bandwidth their fiber delivers as dedicated for consumer services with media-friendly justifications such as security, health, and copyright enforcement applications.

These specialized IP-based services represent a major part of their long-term plan to operate a costly but financially viable nationwide fiber network. According to Tom Tauke, Verizon’s executive vice president of public affairs & communications, these theoretical services would use the excess capacity of your fiber-based broadband connection without affecting the quality or capacity of your television, Internet, or voice services. While technically accurate, this claim is very deceptive from a strategic viewpoint. Verizon and other greedy telecoms will continue to pander to our demands for network neutrality and they will capitulate to seemingly reasonable degree of regulation aiming to restriction their operation of the bandwidth designations for delivering these services. They won’t block ports or merely lock down a range of IPs in order to offer these services. It will start a nothing nefarious at all, just an array of consumer services that share the same conduit as your broadband, voice, and television.

But at some point down the road, they will skirt the spirit of their agreements by delivering the specially designated wavelengths in question via the same home hardware that carries you to your homepage. You might need a specially modified Ethernet cable or a proprietary network driver or something of that sort. But eventually there will be gateway APIs that form a bridge between their proprietary pay-to-play web and the open web of today. And just as consumers choose to shop at Wal-Mart despite the negative effects it brings to our communities, we will embrace a “web à la carte” future if the content applications we love migrates there in the guise of adding significant value. If this scenario comes to pass, your favorite websites will feel the pressure of having to pay up if they don’t want to be left behind. As a result, the costs will be passed on to us. Clearly, Verizon’s vision of the web more closely resembles a co-brand logo inundated cell phone than the open platform we know and love.

In the end, Congress may decide to enact laws to enforce net neutrality, ensuring that broadband carriers can’t meter, tax, or discriminate with fees based on a consumers habits. But in order to fully thwart the greedy dreams of anti-’network neutrality’ executives pulling the strings at Verizon and AT&T, Congress will have their work cut out for them. The danger here is that we aren’t living in a day and age when most of our elected representatives comprehend the spirit and intent of the Internet beyond the importance of email and shopping online. There’s a good chance that they’ll screw this up by passing some large, overly complicated bill instead of the slight bit of light-handed regulation that this extremely important issue calls for.

If we do lose the ground we’ve won it will be because amidst the amazement of being alive at the dawn of something wonderful and new we didn’t realize that we would have to fight to keep it that way. A war is coming that will determine nothing less than the course of the development of the human condition. The web as we know it, and our dreams of what we would like it to be, can not survive unless we rise as individuals to fight with zeal for the ideas that have nurtured it thus far. If we do not, the war will play out around us without our knowledge or consent. As a society that values convenience, escapism, and instant gratification above all else… well. We don’t stand much of a chance in this fight. But now and then through the course of history the difference of even a single voice is magnified into the realm of absurd importance. We need the coming years to be one of those times, but even so, it won’t matter unless we take it upon ourselves to broadcast the revolution.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 1:34 am and is filed under verizon, evil, internet, web, telecom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.