Internet Policies, Monopoly and Global Positioning

I'm listening to Fresh Air where communication scholar Susan Crawford is talking about Net Neutrality and other policies that allow for communication monopolies, lack of consumer choice and poor but expensive service. One thing she noted that struck me was that Stockholm, South Korea, Japan and a number of other countries (including China) have much faster internet access that carries much more data for a fraction of the cost of what we pay in the US. She noted how this puts the US at a global disadvantage in terms of innovation and creativity and threatens our economic and social standing in the world. She wrote the book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

From the book jacket: (see below)

Net Neutrality, Race, Inequality

I took this from Scholars Strategy Network and posted it verbatim below. The title is a bit misleading, as most of the article is more directly about Net Neutrality. It's impact on communities of color, the poor, and those who live in rural areas is not integrated well.  Regardless, the information on Net Neutrality is important.

WHY MINORITIES AND LOW-INCOME AMERICANS HAVE A BIG STAKE IN A FREE AND OPEN INTERNET

by Roderick Graham, Rhode Island College
Advanced technologies spread unevenly to different groups of Americans, with low-income people and minorities lagging behind whites on most measures of access and usage. But recently African Americans and Latinos have been narrowing the digital divide. A 2010 study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project showed that minorities are increasingly active purchasers of Internet enabled phones; two years later, another Pew report documented that minorities are outpacing whites not just in mundane activities like talking on the phone and texting, but also in more sophisticated applications like Internet-banking.

But progress toward closing America’s digital divides could be stalled or reversed by adverse federal government regulations or restrictive interpretations by the Federal Communications Commission. The regulatory details at issue are quite specific, but they have potentially momentous social consequences.

Property Rights and Internet Flexibility
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996 protects the intellectual property rights of inventors and entrepreneurs who create new computer hardware and software programs and content. Producers typically use embedded codes to prevent the copying or modifying of their products, and federal law makes it a crime for users to get around – or “circumvent” – such codes to make modifications beyond those allowed by the original producer.

Why Net Neutrality Matters

Marguerite Reardon over at CNET answers some questions on why net neutrality matters for consumers.

Why you should care about Net neutrality (FAQ)

CNET's Maggie Reardon explains what a recent federal appeals court decision to throw out the FCC's Net neutrality rules means to the average consumer -- and why it matters.The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down on Tuesday rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2010 that would protect the openness of the Internet.

To help readers get a better understanding of what the court decision means and to get a handle on what the potential outcomes might be, CNET has put together this FAQ.What does all this mean to the average Internet user? While the legal arguments may seem complicated and arcane, the reality is that this court decision has the potential to alter the future of the Internet as we know it. Whether you think these changes will harm consumers or benefit them depends on who you choose to believe in this ongoing debate.

Court Ruling Overturns Net Neutrality: Get Ready to Pay More for Less

This Just In (courtesy of Fox News):

The folks at the FreePress have been working long and hard to protect Net Neutrality. If you're looking to get involved this may be a place to start. Here's a link to an online petition to restore Net Neutrality.

Court ruling overturns Net Neutrality, threatens online access, experts warn

Published January 14, 2014

| FoxNews.com

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Thanks for watching that YouTube video! That will be 50 cents, please.
Sound unrealistic? It's actually a distinct possibility, after a Federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down an FCC ruling meant to prevent an Internet service provider -- the company you pay for online access -- from prioritizing some website traffic over others.
And because that rule was wiped off the books, those ISPs are suddenly able to do just that. With service providers suddenly able to charge based on the type of content you watch or the sites you visit, it's easy to imagine a system like that of today's cable television market. Want HBO? It's an extra $5. Want our streaming video package, with YouTube, Hulu, TV.com, and more? That's $5 too.
Don't pay and you can't watch. Period.
The so called “net neutrality” rule, put in place by the FCC in 2010, was intended to ensure equal access to all types of content. Regulators and politicians feared a tiered access to premium content or that ISPs might unfairly fast-track access to their own content over competitors.

FCC, High Speed Internet Access and Telecom Oligarchy

From Crooks & Liars:
This is from "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age", a book by Susan Crawford, a former adviser to Obama on science, technology and innovation issues. In this excerpt, she homes in on the monopoly extended by the Comcast/NBC merger:

To those who argued that the merger would stick U.S. consumers with high-priced, homogenized entertainment and second-class Internet access, Comcast had only to respond that the situation for consumers would not be any worse than it already was. If opponents could not decisively prove “merger-specific harms,” the phrase Comcast employees repeated endlessly to staff members across Washington, the deal could not be blocked.

By February 2010, the accepted wisdom in Washington was that the deal would go through. And it showed Americans their Internet future. Even though there are several large cable companies nationwide, each dominates its own regions and can raise prices without fear of being undercut.

Talk show host Rick Smith on Meredith Attwell Baker, the NBC/Comcast merger, and FCC corruption.

Wireless access, dominated by AT&T Inc. (T) and Verizon, is, for its part, too slow to compete with the cable industry’s offerings; mobile wireless services are, rather, complementary. Verizon Wireless’s joint marketing agreement with Comcast, announced in December 2011, made that clear: Competitors don’t offer to sell each other’s products.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Other developed countries have a watchdog to ensure that all their citizens are connected at cheap rates to fiber-optic networks. In South Korea, more than half of households are already connected to fiber lines, and those in Japan and Hong Kong are close behind. In the U.S., only about 7 percent of households have access to fiber, and it costs six times as much as in Hong Kong.

Rather than try to ensure that the U.S. will lead the world in the information age, American politicians have removed all regulation of high-speed Internet access and have allowed steep market consolidation. The cable industry has done its best to foil municipal efforts to provide publicly overseen fiber Internet access. Now, the U.S. has neither a competitive marketplace nor government oversight.

In the subcommittee hearing, Roberts never faltered, and his performance was judged a success. In the end, the Antitrust Division allowed the merger, and the FCC followed suit.

Compared with people in other countries, Americans are paying more for less and leaving many of their fellow citizens behind. Perhaps they will start to care when they see that the U.S. is unable to compete with nations whose industrial policy has been more forward-thinking.