One of the things I've learned is that building an open and neutral communications environment is a slugfest, a game of inches. America has a top-down mass communications environment and a populace that is used to being marketed to. We don't like thousands of advertising messages a day from people who lie to us for profit, but we accept it because it doesn't seem like there's any choice. This creates a weird sort of muted anger that comes out in flashpoints on the right and the left (anger at free trade, immigration, and anti-media sentiments for starters). Anyway, the net neutrality fight has shown us what happens when a frustrated public begins to organize against corporate elites. AT&T, Verizon, and their various hired flunkies like Mike McCurry lie, obfuscate, and betray the public. But when the political winds shift, they shift, and today there was an important and perceptible shift in the fight. AT&T, the single worst company in terms of net neutrality, gave up a lot of ground to an angry public.
Here's the story - as a condition of AT&T's merger with Bellsouth, AT&T as agreed to net neutrality protections for 24 months or until net neutrality legislation is passed. Scholar Tim Wu has a good analysis of the deal and how the precedent of this regulation will allow Congress to act more effectively to legislate on net neutrality protections. The FCC will probably approve the merger with these new conditions. Even though the merger shouldn't go through, getting net neutrality protections for the tens of millions of customers who use AT&T is a massive victory for a Bush-dominated FCC. This is the biggest, baddest lobby in DC, and they didn't just lose on net neutrality last cycle, they lost again in what should have been a slam dunk.
There are a number of really important concessions that AT&T made. First of all, the company acknowledged that the public has an interest in regulating these networks, that these networks are not AT&T's private property but are a regulated public communications vehicle that AT&T manages for profit. This is a hugely important moral claim, and it shows that the public has won a subtle victory on who should control public communication. Hint, it's not AT&T. Second of all, this victory showed that the public can regulate AT&T's network. AT&T CEO Ed Whiteacre, Hands Off the Internet Chair Mike McCurry, and telco-controlled Senator Ted Stevens have all argued that net neutrality can't be defined and so it can't be regulated. Well it turns out that telecom companies can define net neutrality when it allows them to make billions. Funny that.
There are other important technical victories here, including the fact that WiMax can now be subject to net neutrality regulations. Now of course this is not a perfect deal, and there are very savvy skeptics who believe that AT&T will try to drive a truck through what look like very small loopholes. And frankly, I tend to agree that these companies - the executives and lobbyists of whom lie without blinking - will try to get around any regulation they can, and failing that, will simply break the law and litigate. We should be under no illusions that Verizon and AT&T act in good faith, ever, and react to anything except brute political force and their own greed. I assume they will betray, but in betraying the deal, AT&T will show that it needs more regulatory oversight and not less, and in betraying it will generate even more of a public backlash. There's going to be a fight in Congress over extending net neutrality protections through legislation, as well as genuinely building out a national high speed universal internet that these companies work against and that countries like South Korea had years ago.
For now, we can take solace in the fact a Bush-crony dominated FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, and a multi-billion dollar telecom industry, lost to a group of public interest advocates and a fed-up public. These executives, who do none of the work of operating the systems they use to loot the public through obnoxious toll-booths and subpar services, lost not only this battle, but the intellectual argument that they are anything but a series of PACs and lobbyists attached to a billing service. And that's going to hurt.
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