Net neutrality, a cause I support wholeheartedly, is already (in many ways) a myth.
It’s a myth because, since the Web was spun, we have encouraged third parties to act as censors of the resource, with no controls and no accountability. Programs like NetNanny claim they’re just filtering out porn, but there’s really no way to tell what they’re filtering, save by trial and error. (And since NetNanny is now part of ContentWatch, which uses what it calls "dynamic filtering," there is no way to produce a list.)
Here is an example. It’s a block against the DailyKos political community, put in by Motorola’s Netopia unit, on a wireless hotspot it is managing. I happen to know this company, and centralized censorware has been a part of its 802.11 business from the beginning. Its original business model was to sell censoring as an upgrade, called parental controls, on wireless routers it would install on behalf of phone companies.
The contents of any resulting blacklist, like that of Motorola here, is not open to
inspection. There is no third party policing these products, checking
their claims against the reality. And there is nothing to prevent
telephone companies from supporting these centralized blacklists.
The whole network neutrality debate, as it was enunciated by AT&T
CEO Ed Whitacre in 2005, was that phone companies should be free to
blackmail popular sites for taking their bits from Point A to Point B.
It wasn’t about blocking, but about differentiated service. You’ve got
some nice bits there — a shame if something happened to ’em.
It wasn’t about outright censoring bits. That train, unfortunately,
left the station a decade ago. I think it’s time for us to re-call that
train.
Once you let a third party, without control and without recourse,
decide what you can or can’t access online, once you install that
private government over your Internet access, or your employees’, or
your clients’, or your students’, then you have surrendered control of
the resource to that third party.
All Whitacre wants to do is be that third party.
That’s what he does in cellular already. All the cellular companies do
it. There’s no such thing as "Internet access" on a cellphone. There is
only a walled garden, defined by the cell company, controlled by the
cell company, from which the cell company gains a piece of every
transaction, guaranteed, for doing nothing. And this is at the heart of
phone company profitability today. The cell companies are making money.
The phone companies aren’t.
As you saw at the top of this post, blogs are already being blocked, in
this country, routinely blocked with no notice, with no control, with
no recourse.
If we’re going to have net neutrality, let’s start by providing
transparency to the censorware business. We deserve to know, as a
matter of right, whose sites are being blocked, on what grounds. And we
deserve the right to challenge those grounds, and to demand damages if
a righteous challenge is ignored. We demand control, in other words, at the edge of the network, not the center.
Adults deserve the whole Internet. All of it. Not just what the phone
companies or the censorware companies or the government chooses to
allow us. The control must be at the edge, with us, not at the center,
with anyone else. We can accept the consequences of that. That’s what
being a free people is all about. Let the market decide what the code of conduct will be.
Instead of demanding net neutrality, and just fighting the Bells, we
should demand Internet Freedom, and fight to the death anyone who would
take it away from us, whether their motive is profit or protection.
Seeing the reality of things is the first step to arriving at the right position, which is that network neutrality is neutering the network. You’re halfway there Dana. A few observations.
(1) On my Sanyo M1 phone, on the Sprint network (I cannot tell you how cool a phone this is without looking dorky!!!) I just pulled up this article. If you used Expression Engine (I know, it’s commercial and commercial software is evil), you could probably whip up a more phone readable blog page in a half day, but it was still readable. Most phones with web access on most mainstream networks can do this. What you perceive as a walled garden is stuff those companies optimize for quick access on their phones.
(2) The only reason that e-mail is still a viable communication medium is RBLs (real-time blacklists). They don’t completely solve the spam problem, but they make the cost of spamming much higher than it would be on a neutral network. They force server owners to close their open relays. They force ISPs to police against malicious customers.
(3) Go into the comments of any DailyKos posting and read about the “F—ing Bush Administration” and “C—sucking right wingers”. That’s how it gets flagged for parental controls. If you had screensaver software that pulled random comments from DailyKos and displayed them in large type on your screen in view of co-workers, you would get canned for harassment at any large employer in all 50 states. Why? To protect the employers’ ass. That’s why it gets filtered. Filtering is the symptom, not the problem.
Seeing the reality of things is the first step to arriving at the right position, which is that network neutrality is neutering the network. You’re halfway there Dana. A few observations.
(1) On my Sanyo M1 phone, on the Sprint network (I cannot tell you how cool a phone this is without looking dorky!!!) I just pulled up this article. If you used Expression Engine (I know, it’s commercial and commercial software is evil), you could probably whip up a more phone readable blog page in a half day, but it was still readable. Most phones with web access on most mainstream networks can do this. What you perceive as a walled garden is stuff those companies optimize for quick access on their phones.
(2) The only reason that e-mail is still a viable communication medium is RBLs (real-time blacklists). They don’t completely solve the spam problem, but they make the cost of spamming much higher than it would be on a neutral network. They force server owners to close their open relays. They force ISPs to police against malicious customers.
(3) Go into the comments of any DailyKos posting and read about the “F—ing Bush Administration” and “C—sucking right wingers”. That’s how it gets flagged for parental controls. If you had screensaver software that pulled random comments from DailyKos and displayed them in large type on your screen in view of co-workers, you would get canned for harassment at any large employer in all 50 states. Why? To protect the employers’ ass. That’s why it gets filtered. Filtering is the symptom, not the problem.
Actually landline voice operations still make plenty of money. The issue is that is declining, not going into the red but the black is getting smaller. Since the landline voice network is pretty much built-out, these operations will continue as “cash cows” for several years yet.
I am actually more concerned about transparency than Net Neutrality. Really, the main reason I advocate Net Neutrality is to try and get transparency. I’d happily let providers do all the tiering, blocking, and extortion they want as long as the process is above board. It’s interesting how behavior changes when you know someone is watching. The truth will set us and them free.
Actually landline voice operations still make plenty of money. The issue is that is declining, not going into the red but the black is getting smaller. Since the landline voice network is pretty much built-out, these operations will continue as “cash cows” for several years yet.
I am actually more concerned about transparency than Net Neutrality. Really, the main reason I advocate Net Neutrality is to try and get transparency. I’d happily let providers do all the tiering, blocking, and extortion they want as long as the process is above board. It’s interesting how behavior changes when you know someone is watching. The truth will set us and them free.