ARTS & FARCES internet

More than four years ago, I published “When elephants dance.” It was too long and too tortured, but it shook the web a pretty good bit and the traffic it generated brought my server to its knees multiple times.

At that time the entertainment industry was itching to pull off a worldwide intellectual property power grab, which was, of course, subsequently successful. There were two targets for this power grab: ordinary customers—which the entertainment industry continues to see as pirates—and the technology behemoths—Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. On the technology side, Apple has managed to at least temporarily beat the entertainment industry at its own game with iTunes.

The bit of the article that got traction was the analysis of the politicians that were bought and paid for by the entertainment cartel and my proposed solution. I managed to bury the lead: when two elephants dance—in this case the entertainment cartel and the technology industry—it’s best to get out of the way because there’s going to be a lot of head-banging and foot-stomping going on and the individual creator and customer is likely going to get squished.

Four years later the elephants are back; different elephants, but the same dance. Once again individual customers and creators would do well to get out of the way. The elephants this time are the telecommunications and cable giants on one side and the entertainment cartel joined by the new media content aggregators—Google, Microsoft, Yahoo—on the other. The dance is network neutrality. The phone and cable companies are against it; the entertainment cartel and content aggregators are for it.

The arguments basically boil down to the phone and cable companies wanting to get paid to deliver premium content faster, for a higher price of course. The entertainment companies and aggregators figure they already pay plenty for their bandwidth. But this dance is scripted, with every move carefully choreographed, like television wrestling. They appear to be fighting, but not really.

In short, both sides desperately want to put the internet genie back in the bottle. That’s why we customers had symmetrical broadband—the same speed on our outbound connection and we have on our inbound connection—only for a very shot time in the early days. The elephants want the rest of us to be consumers, not producers. But it’s too late; we’ve already had a bite of the apple, and we like it. A lot.

That’s why network neutrality isn’t enough. It’s time to demand both net neutrality and symmetrical broadband, fiber, and wireless. We’re no longer satisfied being solely consumers of corporate media. The enormous growth of the blogosphere and other micropublishing endeavors on the internet indicate that the internet genie is truly and forever out of the bottle, never to return.

But the telephone and cable companies have Big Money on their side, and they’ve been buying politicians for decades. The telephone utilities spent almost US$45 million currying political favor last year. So far, this election cycle the money is going to the usual suspects:

Who lobbies on behalf of the independent creator? Who protects the digital commons?

The solution is simple:

1. Network neutrality must be legislated; carefully, artfully, and in a judiciously narrow manner
2. Telephone, cable, and wireless companies as well as anyone else providing internet connectivity must be determined to be common carriers
3. Any entity providing broadband connectivity must be mandated to provision symmetrical bandwidth