Page 221 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

00 | Internet and Its Rad cal Potent al

Internet connection to virtually all American homes.” Citizens’ access and free
speech rights, and equal access to broadband Internet services may be affected
by policy-making (or lack of policy-making) at the FCC and in Congress. As the
content industries and the telecom giants press for the right to limit competitors’
access to their own broadband infrastructures, “netizen” activists are formaliz-
ing a federal network neutrality policy.
As access tiering by monopoly or oligopoly ISPs looms as an industry norm,
would-be challengers to their market power have been handicapped by the U.S.
courts. In a 2005 case that strengthened the hand of the telecom conglomerates,
the U.S. Supreme Court removed the ability of Congress or the FCC to require
cable broadband networks to interconnect competitive broadband Internet
providers. Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided the “Brand X” case, the cable
operators offering broadband modems and the telcos offering DSL are legally
sanctioned to deny potential competitors access to their customers by network
interconnection. As the content industries can now safely enjoy monopolistic
rent-seeking privileges online, so too the carriers have become sanctioned gate-
way monopolists extracting rents through the exercise of immense “network
power.” Absent effective public interest regulation and network neutrality rules,
the next phase of consolidation between media and telecom companies is likely
to be massive cross-ownership of broadband content providers and carriers,
who will provide “walled gardens” of branded content, with limited or no access
to unaffiliated parts of the Web. They will privatize the benefits of an open net-
work, while imposing new social costs, such as closed standards, anticompeti-
tive business practices, greater privacy risks, and continuing erosion of fair use
and equitable access to infrastructures.

ConCLusion

The radical potential of the Internet to overturn long-established power struc-
tures has been tempered by deep changes in legal norms, concentrated market
power of the major players, and new techniques for harnessing digital culture
industries and locking down digital culture. The Cold War history of the Inter-
net demonstrates that, in the end, technocrats privileged the values of openness,
interdependence, and decentralization in a survivalist strategy for a different
age. These principles, expressed by an open Internet, are eroding, as are peaceful
alternatives to nuclear proliferation in an increasingly dangerous world. While
cyberspace may not yet completely reflect the values and norms of North Amer-
ican mass society and consumer culture, and still retains alternative and diverse
potentials, the rationalization and commercial pressures on the Internet exerted
by the economy and the state are broad and deep.
Knowing that corporate colonization of the Internet is, in the end, negotiable,
a variety of activist movements are pushing back with proposals for policies on
net neutrality, competitive access, community networking, and a reformed copy-
right and patent framework. Grievances expressed about privacy violations by
state and corporate actors are accumulating in court claims coordinated by non-
profits like Electronic Privacy Information Clearinghouse (EPIC) and Electronic