Thanks!

OK, that may sound like an exaggeration. But next week the Federal Communications Commission is coming to the Boston area — Cambridge, to be exact — for an important public hearing on what the next generation of the Internet will look like.

The hearing is part of the FCC’s ongoing investigation into Comcast’s blocking of Internet traffic. But there’s much more at stake. We are at a critical juncture where it will be decided whether we have a closed Internet controlled by a small handful of giant corporations, or an open Internet controlled by the people who use it.

Comcast wants the former — to dictate which Web sites and services go fast or slow or don’t load at all. And they’re backed by the other would-be gatekeepers at AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner.

Boston, We Have a (Broadband) Problem

In recent months, these cable and phone companies have repeatedly been caught blocking, filtering, and spying on consumers’ Internet activities. If we let them get away with this, these powerful companies will continue to roll back our freedoms whenever we go online.

That’s why it so important for those of us who want the free and open Internet to stay that way — especially if you live in New England — to show up at Harvard on Monday. Here are the details we know so far:

WHAT: A Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet
WHEN: Monday, Feb 25, 2008
TIME: 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
WHERE: Harvard Law School, Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall
1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

We’ve set up a Web site at www.savetheinternet.com/=boston where you can find directions, sign up for more information, and use our automated system to tell your friends about this event.

We’ll update that page — and the blog — with more details about speakers and public involvement as soon as we have them. But since we can’t count on the FCC to publicize this event, we’ll have to start spreading the word ourselves.

Show up. Speak up. And let’s hope this important hearing in Massachusetts is just the beginning of a national conversation that spreads to every town and city across the country.

Cable Company’s Video Plan Recalls AOL’s ‘Walled Garden’

Time Warner made another interesting announcement, just a few days after confirming an experimental project to consider charging Internet users more for intensive Internet bandwidth use.

Guest Post by Marvin Ammori, Free Press General Counsel

On Monday, Time Warner announced a new Internet site called HBO on Broadband. Through this new site, HBO cable subscribers can download about 400 hours of HBO’s movies and original shows each month. Time Warner is rolling out this service to HBO subscribers first in Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and will “slowly” expand it elsewhere, according to the New York Times.

But there is a catch. Well, maybe more than one.

The big ones are that you have to be an HBO cable subscriber with HBO On-demand; and you have to be signed up for Time Warner’s “Road Runner” high-speed Internet, which seems available only where Time Warner provides cable service. (There are also DRM restrictions – no transferring shows to portable devices, and the downloads only last four weeks.)

So let’s unpack this a little.

On the positive side, it’s nice that this HBO on Broadband service provides a convenience to some HBO subscribers in Time Warner regions. And hopefully, it will encourage competitors to make their content available online, without as many “catches.”

Unfortunately, the negatives are more numerous — and complex.

It’s not really online distribution.

First, HBO on Broadband works only for people who already pay to access HBO On-demand on Time Warner Cable. So it’s only useful when these people are on the road. Or if they have a bigger computer screen than TV screen at home.

You see, you can’t cancel your cable service and simply watch HBO online. So HBO on Broadband doesn’t actually compete with cable or broadcast television. To get some online downloads, you have to continue paying for the cable digital basic tier plus the rate for the premium HBO channel.

And that’s only if you live in a Time Warner region. So, at best, for those in Time Warner areas, HBO on Broadband further distinguishes HBO from other premium channels, like Showtime.

It encourages discrimination.

Time Warner announced it may start charging consumers more for using a lot of bandwidth. While this is somewhat better than blocking competitors outright, like Comcast is doing, it still raises Net Neutrality issues.

When it comes to HBO on Broadband, Time Warner owns both the pipe and the content. So it’s probably safe to assume that Time Warner wouldn’t want to apply its new high-bandwidth surcharges to its own product.

But favoring its own content over other channels or programs like BitTorrent would be discriminatory. The company would be using its gatekeeper power to steer users toward content it already owns.

It’s a new walled garden.

Remember the old America Online model? They tried to build their business by keeping users within AOL’s “walled gardens” of content rather than elsewhere on the Web. It didn’t work. But that’s basically what Time Warner (which was once called AOL Time Warner) is still trying to do.

As the company has acknowledged, Time Warner wants to distinguish its broadband offerings from those of its local phone competitors based on exclusive content. They’re betting that HBO-lovers will switch from a rival DSL service to Time Warner so these HBO-lovers can get unlimited access to Taxicab Confessions.

But what happens when other network providers do the same? We get a “balkanization” effect, where each network provider begins to wall off content that it owns for the exclusive use of its subscribers: Time Warner subscribers can get HBO and CNN online. Comcast users get exclusive access to G4 an E! online. And then the phone companies will start cutting their own deals with Hollywood, wooing them with promises of the best “copyright filtering.”

Time Warner might argue that all this represents wonderful competition. But it’s wrong. This content-grabbing by two local giants isn’t nearly as valuable to society as the wide-open application and content competition made possible by Network Neutrality.

The customer is always right.

And — most importantly — this is not what consumers want.

In other countries, thanks to smart policies, consumers do have a choice of Internet providers and a truly competitive market. Internet providers elsewhere have to compete based on things consumers actually want like greater openness, more bandwidth, higher speeds and better value. In countries with real competition, consumers get far higher speeds, guaranteed openness, and more bang for their krone.

But U.S. network providers are trying to avoid costly upgrades that might actually bring us world-class speed, bandwidth, and openness. Instead of investing in the network, they’d rather block sites, discourage Internet usage, and kick users off their networks. Since there’s so little competition here, they can get away with it. We have nowhere else to turn.

Rather than using content add-ons and walled gardens, Time Warner should have to invest in its network offer the openness and choices consumers really want. Better competition policies, like that found abroad, would require Time Warner to make those investments and respond to consumers’ real demands.

But such policies require political leadership — and lots of public pressure to make sure our elected officials don’t get too distracted by all the campaign cash and high-priced lobbying clout the phone and cable companies bring to the table.

This much is clear: Better policies and enforcement — not blocking or metering — are the best way to solve America’s broadband problems.

Time Warner Cable’s plan to charge higher prices to high-bandwidth customers – revealed in a leaked memo obtained by Broadband Reports – is better than blocking applications and throwing users off their networks. But it’s far from an ideal solution for the millions of people who use the Internet for a range of rich media applications.

Internet service providers like Comcast have claimed that the only way to manage their networks is to either disconnect customers that exceed undisclosed bandwidth limitations or secretly block applications like BitTorrent and Gnutella. Clearly, Time Warner Cable’s metered-pricing approach – which will have a trial run in Beaumont, Texas before a possible national rollout – is preferable to such deceptive practices. With metered pricing, consumers can still choose which Web sites they visit, which files they want to share, and what software they want. But it’s little more than a band-aid for our bigger broadband problems.

“Metered prices may chill innovation in cutting-edge applications because consumers will have a disincentive to use them,” explains Ben Scott of Free Press. “Viewed in the context of our long-term national goals for a world-class broadband infrastructure, telling consumers they must choose between blocking and metered pricing is a worrying development.”

Network providers should build better networks, and not squeeze users to pay more for infrastructure that’s a generation behind what’s available in parts of Europe and Asia. In Japan, for instance, consumers can purchase connections of 100 Megabits per second, for both uploads and downloads, for less than it costs to get only 6 Mbs (at best) download and 1 Mbs upload in the United States. France is also far ahead of the United States in providing high-speed Internet at affordable prices (see Free.fr ).

Until cable companies improve their networks, our global competitors will continue to have the edge in technological innovations. And consumers will continue to be deprived of affordable access to the content, software, and networks available abroad. Metering may not be as bad as blocking – but we can do much, much better.