Thanks!

We now have over 75 coalition partners, everyone from the Parents Television Council to the Texas Internet Service Provider’s Association to Consumer Action, and the blogosphere is on fire. We launched yesterday, and net neutrality is just blowing up.

Comic book collectors, video gamers, librarians, hip hop sites, music fans, more video gamers, designers, small business owners, and nonprofits have heard of the issue and are very angry at the telecom cartel’s move.

And now the tech companies have chimed in with Don’t Mess with the Net.

The public is waking up and taking this issue seriously. I’m reading posts at Firewheeldesign to Manatheater to Josh Marshall to James Hudnall to Ralph Maughan’s Wildlife Reports. And it’s making a difference on Capitol Hill, according to National Journal.

The triple whammy of renewed opposition to the current bill is likely to complicate the drive by House Energy and Commerce Committee Joe Barton, R-Texas, to win approval. His legislation is highly favored by Bell telephone companies seeking to quickly enter the pay-television market on a nationwide basis. It is scheduled for a Wednesday committee vote.

Americans like their internet freedom. Congress is finding that out.

The hiring of former Clinton Administration spinmeister Mike McCurry by a front-group funded by the Baby Bells is a text book example of telco manipulation of public opinion. McCurry effort to help companies like AT&T and Verizon put toll booths on the Internet underscores the inside the beltway, best-that-money-can-buy PR campaign they have embarked on to convince policymakers and the public that telephone companies should dictate which data flows over the Internet to the consumer.

McCurry is dishonestly spinning this brazen telco grab at Net control as a “Hands off the Internet” campaign.

The history of the Internet is clear and it contradicts this claim. The basic approach to the Internet requiring the unimpeded flow of data was dictated and funded by the Department of Defense in the 1960s to create an open communications system, a policy enforced by the National Academy of Science when it took over. The telephone companies, over whose lines the data flowed, were not allowed to engage in any sort of discrimination or manipulation of access to the Internet because it was the policy of the Communications Act, as implemented by the Federal Communications Commission in the Computer Inquiries (first launched in 1968) to keep the network neutral.

The cable and telephone companies want to abandon this fundamental principle for their high-speed Internet, broadband networks. They want to be allowed to discriminate against service providers and to charge the consumer for access to the network and the content, service, and applications providers for access to the consumer. They want to make exclusive deals with some services for a fast lane, while others are kept off that network. If they are allowed to discriminate they will charge lower rates or give priority in routing or speed to their own services or their allies, while they punish their competitors.

McCurry’s will join a stable of lobbyists and front groups dedicated to obfuscating this history and turning the facts on their head. In fact, this is the second time around for “Hands off The Internet.” In the late 1990s it was a front group located in a law firms with close ties to AT&T (then a cable company) and its General Council, Jim Ciccone, a Department of Justice official in the first Bush administration and the Executive Director the Bush Presidential library.

The cable operators managed to avoid the obligation of operating a neutral network in the late 1990s and the U.S. has been slipping in the race for broadband Internet adoption ever since. Cable operators charge between five and ten times as much for broadband access megabit basis as consumers are charged in the leading broadband countries like Japan and Korea in Asia, and most of the advanced European nations. The telephone companies charge even more. Because this “cozy duopoly” has been deregulated by the FCC, not Congress, there is no pressure to lower prices.

Worse still, with the network operators acting as gatekeepers for the first time in the history of the Internet, innovators will be driven away from the Internet space. In short, they want to turn the Internet into a version of cable service, where the network operator, not the consumer, decides what services succeed. They will have a strong incentive to stifle competition and control innovation. The vibrant, Internet economy will be strangled.

That is why Congress should act to ensure the public has nondiscriminatory access to the communications network. This is a principle that has applied to every transportation and communications network ever deployed in America – roads, canals, steamships, railroads, telegraph, telephone, and airports. In the information age, it is more important than ever.

Mark Cooper
Director of Research
Consumer Federation of America
markcooper@aol.com
(301) 384-2204

From Telephony online:

A diverse and perhaps unlikely group of political activists and associations assembled today to voice opposition to a U.S. House bill that it says would impede InterNet innovation by undermining network neutrality.The “SavetheInterNet.com Coalition” includes InterNet pioneer and Google executive Vint Cerf, Gun Owners of America, political action group Moveon.org, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Consumer Federation of America, American Library Association and others.

The group pointed to its own diversity–uniting such disparate interests as Gun Owners of America and Afro-Netizen.com, an online African American community group–as evidence of the righteousness of its cause as well as the range of stakeholders in Net neutrality.

“Whenever you see people on the far left and the far right getting together [to oppose the same bill],” said Craig Fields, director of InterNet operations for conservative gun advocacy group Gun Owners of America, it’s a good indication that, “what Congress is getting ready to do is un-American.”

“If the major telecoms think they can taint or characterize opposition to what is a power grab on their part as liberal or an anti-free market approach, they’re mistaken,” he said.

Larry Pratt wrote this letter to Congress:

Dear Representative,

As Congress considers major legislation affecting the nation’s telecommunications structure, particular attention must be paid towards maintaining the Internet as a medium accessible to all, so that the free market might continue to determine which goods, services and ideas prosper.

For many years, those few companies whose hardware comprises the “skeleton” of the Internet have had to operate under the concept of Network Neutrality. That is, when selling their services, they had to treat all customers the same… all purchasers of a particular amount of bandwidth paid the same and were given the same level of service.

The result has been a vibrant and competitive marketplace, full of innovation and a definite positive force in our nation’s economy. Moreover, unfettered access to the Internet has given rise to an explosion in grassroots activism all across the political spectrum. Every blogger is a potential Patrick Henry, and every grassroots association has the means to disseminate its point of view.

It would be a shame if a handful of major telecoms were free to pick and choose which individuals and associations were the recipients of quality service – and which were left out in the cold. Without even ascribing a political motive to their actions, greed alone will skew the Internet marketplace if companies can deny superior quality of service to those who choose to use the products of competitors.

In the case of grassroots outside groups like GOA, equal access to the hardware, software, and bandwidth that comprise the Internet is essential to a free marketplace of ideas. Indeed, that is what we have had all along, and the result has been every bit as significant as the development of the printing press.

That marketplace has thrived even though we are essentially dealing with a government-supported oligopoly here. As long as government is setting the ground rules, those rules must include forced neutrality in order to ensure that the market will determine which goods and services prosper. It is not enough that the FCC be empowered to set “policies” as such policies would be subject to the whims of future administrations. Rather, the concept of Network Neutrality must be codified as black-letter law.

GOA urges you to insist upon Network Neutrality when revamping the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure.

Sincerely,

Larry Pratt
Executive Director

The blogoshere has lit up with news of the launch of the SavetheInternet.com Coalition. Here’s a sampling of the more than 135 postings that mention or link to the campaign:

Nero’s Fiddle:

When you can get Glenn Reynolds and MoveOn.org to unite in common cause, you figure it’s got to be a slam-dunk issue. And this one is. With almost no noise in the media, the government is mulling ceding control of the Internet to the major ISPs, allowing them to selectively throttle bandwidth or block sites and services as they see fit.

David Weinberger at Joho the Blog:

Remember when democracy had something to do with all people being equal? With ensuring that our institutions don’t get too powerful? Net neutrality has made the Internet a great equalizer, not just for Americans but for voices around the world.

Boztopia:

I hope you take the time to read through this and contact the people who represent you. It doesn’t matter what your politics are, what you use the Web for, or what you think about regulation. This is about ensuring the Web continues to remain free . . .

BlueMeme

The owners of the pipes make it sound as if supply is tight, and price discrimination is the answer. But (a) there is still plenty of unused bandwidth out there (which is why prices are falling) and (b) the very idea of price discrimination in an environment where both buyers (that’s us) and sellers are both paying to hook up to the Web is, well insane.

Kiersten Marek at Kmareka.com:

This is a cause that we little websites need to be on board with: net neutrality. Without it, the big-money players on the internet could easily squeeze out access to little websites like this one.

Clif Taylor at Cuddlefish:

Without net neutrality, decisions now made collectively by millions of users will be made in corporate boardrooms. The choice we face now is whether people can choose the content and services they want, or whether the broadband barons will choose for them.

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine:

The age of business models built on scarcity and on keeping your customers from doing what they want to do is over.

Bobby Foley:

“This is a call for support from Internet users of every demographic. This will affect everyone, and right now the issue is a quiet one being discussed in Washington . . .

I Hate Peas:

This is a huge issue, and without public outcry, I am truly worried that Congress will give in to big business over the public good. . . Find the members of the Save The Internet coalition here. There’s some folks I really respect on it, and some folks I generally have no use for, but hey, this is something we can all agree on. . .

Earlier today I set up a page on MySpace for Save the Internet. There are now 400 friends on the MySpace profile, including the well-regarded IPTV broadcast Ask A Ninja. The Internet is very well-liked.

In related news, Alex Curtis’s video on net neutrality has been seen over 8000 times.

I’ve never seen a pickup like this on a cause, and we haven’t even officially announced. Congress is assuming that people don’t really care about telecom regulations. This is not true, we very much do care about the internet.

I hadn’t thought of it this way, but already this campaign is showing how the telcos vision of a gated community is far inferior in quality, creativity, and speed of a free and open internet. For instance, no one told Alex to make the video; we didn’t collaborate on it, and he didn’t run it by anyone over here to see if it was good. He just made it, put it on YouTube, blogged it on the Public Knowledge site, and other people liked it and blogged it. No one forced anyone to watch the video, or send it to friends. It wasn’t astroturfed with millions of dollars of telecom money.

A free and open internet is just something people care about, precisely because it allows them to choose their own path, watch what they want, and learn what they want.

Tim Wu sent this email in response to libertarian concerns on this issue.

I believe that thinking libertarians fear two types of centralized power: that exercised by government, and that exercised by government-supported monopolistic incumbents, like AT&T.

The Network Neutrality debate is really a debate about what are, in effect, crown corporations, AT&T and Verizon, whose plans would distort private competition among internet service providers.  Companies like AT&T are infrastructure providers, almost like the roads — and their plans are very much simple tollbooths placed on a utility necessary for the operation of the private market.  That’s why I think even libertarians have reason to resist the incursions of a company like AT&T on the internet and its design.

This clip is from libertarian Alex Curtis at Public Knowledge.

So says Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit.

But things don’t stay open on their own, and there are some signs that the Internet may grow less open in the future. One such sign is the movement by ISPs toward a two-tier Internet where “users would find it easier and quicker to connect to services provided by the companies that paid … fees than others. Invisibly, customers would be steered towards these ‘approved’ services.”

I’m already paying BellSouth for my Internet service, and if they can’t make it faster despite improving technology and lower costs, I plan to take my business elsewhere. I don’t want to see them trying to steer me toward people who pay them under-the-table for better service. But they’ll try, if they’re allowed to get away with it, and this is just the first of many such schemes, I suspect, from all sorts of players. You want to keep this revolution going? Be ready to fight for it.

Sounds about right to me.