I generally stay clear of "awareness" campaigns when they are really a form of self-backpat. This one concerns a less tangible and more amorphous asset, the whole of the Internet, and what kind of access rights we enjoy in the coming years. I'll let ol' Consumerist explain in its friendly way:
Why It Seems Like The Entire Internet Is Talking About Net Neutrality TodayI keep thinking of how cable television looked in the late 1980s after the FCC revived enforcement of "Syndication Exclusivity" rules, or "SynDex" for short .... a nickname which sounds like an OTC antihistamine. Apparently the CRTC up north has its own version, "Simultaneous Substitution" or "SimSub", obviously a virtual reality sandwich. The general idea is to favor a channel local to you over a distant one when the same content is airing on both simultaneously. This is meant to keep advertising revenue flowing to your local UHF which might otherwise go to the "superstation".
In practice, SynDex made Swiss cheese out of your rack of thirty or forty channels, with blackout slates appearing all day and night. Usually the cable head end never got the timing right, lifting a channel block one or two minutes into the start of an unclaimed show. The notion of "duplication" was always watery, as when two channels were airing different seasons of the same series. One channel had Colonel Blake in his college sweater and Radar was still a sly jaded punk; the other was well into the Potter regime, marked by the advanced baldness of Major WInchester and Klinger having dropped his cross-dressing habit.
More to the point, the blackouts forced you to watch undercooked and inferior channels with poor color accuracy, bad audio, cheaper worn tape, sloppy production values, and/or careless management. Meanwhile SynDex shunned channels with consistently excellent broadcast standards, the very thing you paid a monthly fee to a "community antenna" service to obtain. Funny how the poor "underdog" channels never improved their signal or practices despite all that sponsor money they were purportedly recovering.
One time in Massachusetts, a live once-in-an-era event was aired, a farewell to Larry Bird at Boston Garden as he retired from pro basketball. The channel was a well-respected carrier of all the Celtics and Bruins games. Stools were set out on the arena floor for special guests. At one point Bird's archrival "Magic" Johnson gave a moving tribute, saying "this was the man I feared the most". I'd like to tell you how the rest of the show went, but at 32 minutes past the hour I heard the familiar "hash" burst which accompanied the rude replacement by a crude graphic slate used for channel blocking. Some low-wattage channel with an eternally pink wash over the picture was airing M*A*S*H at that time, also usually scheduled on the Boston station. Nobody at my cable company got the memo about the pre-emption.
Skip forward about a decade. My small workplace got the brand new so-called "broadband internet" service, incidentally provided by the big-time cable TV company which had bought out the bunch in the prior story. This was a good time to be a small operator, before there was a Yahoo or a Google or a bloody FaceBook to dominate the "In-foe-mation See-yoo-per Highway" Anna Paquin once kept promising every night. If you wanted to run a data search, it was still common to try WAIS, Gopher, Archie, TelNet, and various other protocols which the newfangled World Wide Web soon shoved aside. On that "web" thingy you could try Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, SavvySearch, and more.
Point being, there was much less consolidation, and more ways to get at what you wanted, with an understanding of the Internet as a resource and not a single service. This we'll underline more later. In 1995, that coaxial internet sure was peppy compared to dialup. But it came with hidden limitations. Manual entry of URLs was then more routine, so when you typed and entered the URL for Lycos or Alta or whatever, something goofy happened. The home page for the cable company service would refresh instead. Must be some mistake, right? You could type more slowly, type in different search sites, same result. The cable company was not letting you leave their little fenced backyard. You were gonna search through
their portal and
like it, see? Nyaaah, nyaaah!
Skip forward another two decades. We have a handful of ever-expanding corporations guarding more and more of our gates to the Internet. We allow them to control de facto regional monopolies, like a bunch of Chicago gangsters a century ago. There is talk of carving up the network into virtual provinces, into privileged neighborhoods and neglected ghettoes. Your cable TV provider, which is also a content provider, which is also a phone service provider, and so on, would love to screw with your access to any rival or innovator which they fear will compete. We have various nations which want to impose their own standards of privacy and copyright on the entire global network. If their citizens can't have it,
no one can have it. This of course is counter to the whole design of the Internet. It was built to keep open and not close connections.
We are having this "Neutrality" fight because of people in corporate and legislative power who cannot separate the ideas of "resource" from "service" or "product". When you turn your shower dial or plug in a lamp, you expect access to water and power, the same water and power that everyone else gets if you're part of a shared distribution. You expect to have rights and recourse when that access is disrupted or denied unfairly. We cannot keep treating the Internet as though it's not the same as a regulated utility. It is not a luxury anymore. It is not an "information service" you can dole out like Wonder Bread. It is part of our infrastructure now. It is possibly the most pure and complex expression of Democratic -slash- Socialist ideals ever committed to technology. When you build it and let us come, we can solve our many other problems with an efficiency never known in my childhood.
When you let the "free market" run loose, players compete unfairly for your dollars by taking away your choice. They block your channels, they redirect your searches, they make your DJ play from a short song list, they replace your relevant local news with syndicated fluff, they take a whole wing of the movie multiplex for Superhero Tentpole Part Eight, and I could go on but don't have all night.
Let's just put a big red cap on this point. Restraining and manipulating internet access to serve one entity's goals gets us into human rights violation territory, which we will never escape once the border is crossed. If you want a sneak preview, try using what North Korea and China thinks the "Internet" should look like. It's also pointless from an engineering view. Internet forefathers Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf have been telling us for years that the whole thing works best when you just connect the wires and antennae and let all the traffic take care of itself. Throttling and boosting and funneling data in arbitrary ways creates more network burden than benefit. This means that "premium content delivery" at a ritzy price has no justifiable basis, no matter what lobbyist or marketeer patter says.
The Wheeler-era Open Internet Order does not "kill jobs" or "restrict trade" or "censor your TV", as its loudmouth opponents claim. Nor does it cling to "outdated rules" as Ajit "Weed Whacker" Pai and his toadies profess. It swings focus back where it belongs, on your ability as a citizen of a free nation to do as your please within legal reason with a great resource. The corpo gatekeepers snarl and strain their leashes because Title II of the Communications Act makes more work for them. That classification comes with the obligation to ensure fair pricing, universal access, personal privacy, and accommodation for the handicapped. Your self-appointed Internet masters should be providing those very sensible things already without a law to force them. History demonstrates that they need a regulatory shove.
Team Pai is expected to reverse the progress made by the Wheeler Order, despite a flood of opposing pleas from citizens and industry alike. In a curious sidebar, the FCC in-box is also being packed with "Astroturf" comments and outright forgeries. The FCC is in effect
being attacked by shills for anti-Open Internet. Thus far this has been shrugged off. They need some honest input. They need to know that you're not worried about streaming two seasons of "Friends" but losing a vital part of your civilized life. Not because Pai and Pals will find network religion and take good advice, but because this mess is destined for Congressional and court challenge. Any resistance filed and on record can help prevent a horribly short-sighted decision from wrecking our right to shape the future as the Internet endures its awkward puberty.
Internet Day of Action's Title II Advocates Speak Out - Broadcasting & Cable
The FCC Pretends to Support Net Neutrality and Privacy While Moving to Gut Both - Electronic Frontier Foundation
Make No Mistake: Chairman Pai Wants to Roll Back the Net Neutrality Rules. Here's What You Need to Know. - Free Press
FCC Has No Interest In Figuring Out Who Filed Fake Anti-Neutrality Comments In Your Name - Consumerist
How To Tell The FCC Just What You Think Of Its Plan To Break Net Neutrality - Consumerist
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