Comcast’s ‘Bill of Rights,’ Wrong for an Open Internet
April 18th, 2008 by tkarrComcast can’t seem to get it straight.
On the one hand they’re snubbing a debate over openness and the Internet — refusing to take part in yesterday’s FCC public hearing. On the other, they’ve announced plans to open an industry-wide conversation to craft a “bill of rights” for ISPs, Internet companies and users.
The latter, a Comcast collaboration with Internet traffic managing company Pando Networks, received mixed reviews earlier this week when the cable company rolled it before the media.
I trashed it. And now my initial concerns seem justified.
The Right to Special Treatment
For just as the public hearings were getting underway in Stanford, Robert Levitan, Pando chief executive, told the New York Times that “he hoped Comcast might program its network to give preference to applications like the one his company makes.”
Levitan’s admission exposes the true motives behind industry efforts to craft a “bill of rights:” to lay the ground for an Internet rife with discriminatory deals and preferential treatment.
“The company appears to want to use the network management issues raised by Comcast to seek a deal that provides them preferential distribution over the Internet,” Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition, said in a statement.
“It is exactly why technology companies, innovators, and millions of consumers have argued that the marketplace is not working properly and have asked the FCC provide basic rules of the road to protect against such behavior.”
The Right to Ignore the Rules
The industry’s carefully orchestrated announcements of initiatives to self-regulate are not the magic of the free market at work, Free Press policy director Ben Scott testified yesterday. “It is the threat of regulatory intervention.”
Without that threat — and an agency willing to act on behalf of the public interest — we’d have already sacrificed several basic Internet freedoms to the whims of Pando and Comcast.
“Comcast actions to date have shown that they can’t be trusted to ’self regulate,’” L. Peter Deutsch, a pioneering Xerox Palo Alto Research Center computer scientist, told the FCC. “Allowing the big carriers rather than consumers and public interest advocates, to take the lead in codifying a ‘bill of rights’ for Internet users would be like letting King George’s cabinet take the lead in writing the U.S. Constitution.”
Comcast had hoped that we would all interpret the “bill of rights” as a genuine — to conclude that public hearings and FCC oversight were not needed to keep the Internet open for everyone.
The Right to Undermine the Internet
The Comcast message, in case you’ve missed it, sounds like this: “The free market can solve its own problems and deliver to end users the Internet experience that they desire. Trust us.”
“A tiger has a nature, and that nature is not one you trust with your child,” Professor Larry Lessig said during yesterday’s Stanford hearing. “A company has a nature. It’s nature is to produce economic values and wealth for its share holders.”
According to Lessig, that one essential truth is about as much trust that the public needs to extend to public corporations. It’s understood that they will behave in this way, and nothing is wrong with that.
Public policy, on the other hand, is designed to make it profitable for corporations to behave in ways that serve the public interest.
According to Lessig: “We set public policy to create the incentives for them to pick the right business models.”
In a perfect scenario we also set public policy to foster more a productive and economically beneficial marketplace for all involved. Net Neutrality is such a policy.
April 26th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Whats sad…
is that Cocmast honestly believes that this may be a reasonable solution yet all it really means is that the politician who gets into bed with Cocmast will pull the strings.
The only way we can confront lobbyists and these puppets of comcast is by brute force.
I’m not talking about sensless acts of violence…
We need to outnumber them, and not just 10 to 1, or 100 to 1… I’m talking along the lines of tens of millions to each voice they try to rise above ours.
I know its stupid to say, ok everyone whos on Comcast, drop your service this next month. Thats unreasonable, most of us need internet to survive. I say we organize protests infront of head offices of Comcast around then nation.
April 27th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
The corporate mantra of ‘Allow the free market to regulate itself’ is exactly what brought us to our current economic state - recession - by the 2000 Federal Law thtat allows an entire sector of securities dealings (ie., complex derivitives) to go completely unregulated by the SEC. As Larry Lessig points out, the nature of the corporate beast is ‘to produce economic values and wealth for its share holders,’ which is usually totally committed to the most immediate results, usually without regard for anything else - neither regard for persons nor regard in terms of long term effects.
So I suggest that you write to all of your congressional representatives and express your wishes that they watch the FCC hearings closely for signs of corporate influence. You may also comment that you will be voting with a hard look at a candidate’s stance on corporate influence in general. And ask your friends and neighbors to do the same.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
companies should not say whether or not something is allowed to be on the web but the individual that puts it there is the one that get to make that decision so leav it up to the people not those who run major companies