Monopoly Capitalism in Cyberspace

More on the corporartions attempt to control your access to the Internet. Monopoly capitalism in cyberspace. So much for all those liberaltarian apologists for capitalism that viewed the birth of the dot.com economy as different than good old capitalism. Like Wired magazines infamous article on the Long Boom

The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020
By Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden
We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that

Welcome to the new world of Trusts in cyberspace, which is going to result in more regulation rather than competition. Your choice. Monopolies with no competition, or regulations to promote choice which result in Oligopolies with no competition. And that contradiction has led to the voices of the freedom in cyberspace to now come on side with us, the users versus the monopoly corporations dominating the WWW.

Google, Telecom Execs Stir Up The Internet Access Debate On Capitol Hill

The issue is network neutrality: Should telecom and cable companies charge premiums for companies like Google and Skype that benefit from broadband pipes?

Are Internet toll roads ahead?

'Father of the Internet' Asks for Internet Neutrality Law

Vinton Cerf says Congress should pass law forbidding discrimination against competing Web services.

Echoing consumer group concerns that the newly deregulated telecom carriers will try to give their own services better speeds over broadband networks, Cerf asked the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to adopt a Net neutrality law, requiring broadband providers to allow customers to go to any legal Web site, attach any legal device, and run any legal application on their networks. If large broadband providers are permitted to charge Web sites or Web-based application vendors extra for customer access, small innovative companies will get frozen out, he said.

"Nothing less than the future of the Internet is at stake in these discussions," said Cerf, now vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google. "We must preserve neutrality in the system in order to allow the new Googles of the world, the new Yahoos, the new Amazons to form. We risk losing the Internet as catalyst for consumer choice, for economic growth, for technological innovation, and for global competitiveness."

A Gated Internet

The companies who build and control the Internet's pipes want to control the content over those pipes, too.

Anush Yegyazarian, PC World

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Priority for Sale?

The capitalist in me says, "Go for it." The consumer in me says, "Wait a minute." If ISPs truly need more revenue to cover the costs of deploying broadband networks (and let's give them that one, for the sake of argument), I can understand that they'd want to raise rates for Internet access and bandwidth use, or impose penalties for excessive bandwidth usage. In fact, many contracts already include such a provision; a Web site can be shut down if it goes over its bandwidth allocation. What I'm far less sanguine about is allowing ISPs any control over content, especially if that control comes with a price tag.

Large Web sites offer me most of what I want when I surf the Net. But smaller sites are typically the ones that offer innovative services or radical improvements on existing services. Would Google have grown to its current prominence if Yahoo had been able to pay ISPs to make its site run much faster? Perhaps, perhaps not. The pay-to-prioritize scheme automatically favors large, established players who already have a customer and revenue base and can afford the rates. What will we miss out on if smaller sites have even less chance of being seen?

Moreover, content prioritization can be taken much further. Since many ISPs offer services that compete with those of third-party vendors, it's no stretch to believe that, somewhere down the line, ISPs may also prioritize their own offerings and even lock out those of their competitors. It's easy to envision a world where, say, Verizon customers have fast access to Verizon Wireless's music store, but have a harder time getting consistent, fast performance when they go to Apple's iTunes. Voice-over-IP services are another case in point: Will customers be able to subscribe to Vonage if their ISP has its own VoIP service? Your ISP could become like your cell phone provider: You can call anyone you like, but there are certain music and video services that are only available (or only viable) from specific carriers.

Consumer advocacy groups Consumer Federation of America, the Consumers Union, and Free Press recently released results from a survey that indicates Americans want their Internet to remain neutral. These groups are lobbying Congress to incorporate network neutrality into law, while telecom firms are lobbying hard to prevent it.

Although I don't particularly want more regulations, I do think that in this case there is something worth protecting. The Internet's pipes are just that: pipes. They should not be turned into gates that wall in or restrict certain content while giving preferential treatment to other data. I want the content and services that I choose; I don't want my ISP limiting or handicapping my choices.

It is interesting to put this debate on Information and Ideas in the context of the original debate on Trusts which was over 100 years ago. Here is American Anarchist Benjamin Tuckers take on the matter which is perhaps more relevant than ever in this day and age of the new information economy and the corporatization of copyright and intellectual property. Such property rights are not yours or mine but the use of patent by corporations to hold onto their right to profit and monopolize ideas, products, genes, etc.

The Attitude of Anarchism Toward Industrial Combinations

Excerpted from the book;
Individual Liberty: Selections From the Writings of Benjamin R. Tucker
Vanguard Press, New York, 1926
Kraus Reprint Co., Millwood, NY, 1973.

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From September 13 to 16, 1899, the Civic Federation held a Conference on Trusts, in Chicago, before which it invited about one hundred individuals from every walk of life and of various political and economic beliefs to discuss the question of trusts from every angle. Mr. Tucker was one of those invited to address the assembly, and his paper, which is here reproduced in full, excited more interest and comment, according to the newspaper accounts at the time, than the remarks of any other speaker at the conference:

Now, Anarchism, which, as I have said, is the doctrine that in all matters there should be the greatest amount of individual liberty compatible with equality of liberty, finds that none of these denials of liberty are necessary to the maintenance of equality of liberty, but that each and every one of them, on the contrary, is destructive of equality of liberty. Therefore it declares them unnecessary, arbitrary, oppressive, and unjust, and demands their immediate cessation.

Of these four monopolies - the banking monopoly, the land monopoly, the tariff monopoly, and the patent and copyright monopoly - the injustice of all but the last-named is manifest even to a child. The right of the individual to buy and sell without being held up by a highwayman whenever he crosses an imaginary line called a frontier; the right of the individual to take possession of unoccupied land as freely as he takes possession of unoccupied water or unoccupied air; the right of the individual to give his IOU, in any shape whatsoever, under any guarantee whatsoever, or under no guarantee at all, to anyone willing to accept it in exchange for something else, - all these rights are too clear for argument, and any one presuming to dispute them simply declares thereby his despotic and imperialistic instincts.

For the fourth of these monopolies, however, - the patent and copyright monopoly, - a more plausible case can be presented, for the question of property in ideas is a very subtle one. The defenders of such property set up an analogy between the production of material things and the production of abstractions, and on the strength of it declare that the manufacturer of mental products, no less than the manufacturer of material products, is a laborer worthy of his hire. So far, so good. But, to make out their case, they are obliged to go further, and to claim, in violation of their own analogy, that the laborer who creates mental products, unlike the laborer who creates material products, is entitled to exemption from competition. Because the Lord, in his wisdom, or the Devil, in his malice, has so arranged matters that the inventor and the author produce naturally at a disadvantage, man, in his might, proposes to supply the divine or diabolic deficiency by an artificial arrangement that shall not only destroy this disadvantage, but actually give the inventor and author an advantage that no other laborer enjoys, - an advantage, moreover, which, in practice goes, not to the inventor and the author, but to the promoter and the publisher and the trust.

Convincing as the argument for property in ideas may seem at first hearing, if you think about it long enough, you will begin to be suspicious. The first thing, perhaps, to arouse your suspicion will be the fact that none of the champions of such property propose the punishment of those who violate it, contenting themselves with subjecting the offenders to the risk of damage suits, and that nearly all of them are willing that even the risk of suit shall disappear when the proprietor has enjoyed his right for a certain number of years. Now, if, as the French writer, Alphonse Karr, remarked, property in ideas is a property like any other property, then its violation, like the violation of any other property, deserves criminal punishment, and its life, like that of any other property, should be secure in right against the lapse of time. And, this not being claimed by the upholders of property in ideas, the suspicion arises that such a lack of the courage of their convictions may be due to an instinctive feeling that they are wrong.

I have tried, in the few minutes allotted to me, to state concisely the attitude of Anarchism toward industrial combinations. It discountenances all direct attacks on them, all interference with them, all anti-trust legislation whatsoever. In fact, it regards industrial combinations as very useful whenever they spring into existence in response to demand created in a healthy social body. If at present they are baneful, it is because they are symptoms of a social disease originally caused and persistently aggravated by a regimen of tyranny and quackery. Anarchism wants to call off the quacks, and give liberty, nature's great cure-all, a chance to do its perfect work.

Free access to the world of matter, abolishing land monopoly; free access to the world of mind, abolishing idea monopoly; free access to an untaxed and unprivileged market, abolishing tariff monopoly and money monopoly, - secure these, and all the rest shall be added unto you. For liberty is the remedy of every social evil, and to Anarchy the world must look at last for any enduring guarantee of social order.

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