Harold Feld over at Wet Machine picks up on themes I raised earlier today regarding the connection between the “neutral vs. two-tiered” Internet issue and the health of our democracy. Harold also digs more deeply into specific net neutrality proposals than I did. Here are some excerpts where he addresses the fundamental issue:
It is quite possible that the most important piece of campaign finance reform to pass in 2006 will be Senator Wyden’s “Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006.” Until now the internet did not require candidates to raise huge amounts of money to pay for the ability to reach voters. Without Net Neutrality, all that changes. The internet will increasingly come to resemble radio, television and cable, where the well-funded buy their way onto your screen and the rest get crowded out. Not because of any evil corporate conspiracy or antidemocracy cabal, but because of the iron rules of economics.
If companies can make money charging political speakers for premium access, they will. If that’s bad for democracy and free speech, too bad. Companies aren’t in business to promote democracy, but to maximize value for shareholders. If that means that well-funded candidates and talk radio hosts can buy “premium” access while independent bloggers and pod casters can’t, that’s what will happen. Too bad about that democracy and free speech thing. Nothing against it you understand but, y’know, it’s just business.
Until now, the internet has acted as a medium that levels barriers for speakers by allowing anyone to speak directly to anyone else at anytime and on the same terms. Bloggers and podcasters speak to audiences as small as a few friends or as large as millions, all for the same cost. People email each other video and audio clips or flash animation. Candidates and interest groups from the most progressive to the most conservative continue to experiment with news ways to use the internet to reach people that traditional media makes prohibitively expensive.
But if such “high bandwidth” traffic slows to a crawl unless the speaker pays for “premium” delivery, the same thing will happen to the internet that happened to television and cable. Well funded candidates and special interests will pay to have slickly produced “content” and “issue ads” that download at super-speed in movie quality. Independent blogs and podcasts that can’t afford the extra fee will be crowded out. Once again, the need for big money will “blind the eyes of the righteous and pervert the words of the wise” (Deut. 16:19) by driving candidates to court big donors at the expense of public policy and put fund-raising ahead of public service.
Perhaps most importantly, what happens to the ability of people to use the internet to research candidates and positions, or who want to forward useful or amusing political speech to others? According to this study by the PEW Center for American Life, people used the internet to talk to their friends about political issues, visit websites that provided greater details than available offline, and were more likely to participate in political discussions and check out alternate points of view. If it costs someone extra money or becomes frustratingly slow to use the internet for these purposes, they stop; and we as a society go back to getting all our political information through sound bites.
Mitch Shapiro at 6:06 PM|Comments(0)
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