How the TeleCom Industry Plans to Take Over the Internet

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/02-7

Friday, July 2, 2010
CommonDreams.org
How the TeleCom Industry Plans to Take Over the Internet in Four Easy Steps
Timothy Karr

Have you heard about the battle over the Internet?

It's a power grab that involves lawyers, lobbyists, unscrupulous legislators, phony front groups and the most powerful telecommunications companies in the world.

They've aligned themselves against the rest of us -- the millions of Americans who use the Internet every day, in increasingly inventive ways.

They've opened their wallets to Washington. It's an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars and it's being made right now by AT&T, Comcast and Verizon -- the companies that provide broadband access to the vast majority of Americans.

These companies are chasing the ultimate payout: control, not just of the Internet wires that snake into our homes, but over the information that flows across those wires..

While this fight has been brewing for years, it's come to a head at a time when more and more broadband users are taking to YouTube, Twitter, Mashable and other innovations.

Right now, the FCC and Congress are weighing a series of decisions that could determine whether this decade-long explosion of Internet creativity was a short-lived experiment in people-powered media, or the beginning of an era of more decentralized, participatory and democratic communications.

20th-century media colossi prefer a return to the old ways, where a handful of gatekeeper firms operated the turn-on valve to all popular information. It was a profitable model that worked well for one-way communications like newspapers, radio, and television. If only it can be applied in age of flash mobs and FourSquare, too.

These media giants are spending a fortune to convince lawmakers and regulators to dismantle consumer protections on the Internet and give industry absolute power over the most important communications medium of our time.

Here's how they plan to do it, in four easy steps:

ONE: Buy Congress

The New York Times reported yesterday that AT&T, Comcast and Verizon executives and political action committees are among the top campaign contributors to lawmakers responsible for communications policy on the Hill.

"Political contributions from AT&T in the current election cycle reached $2.6 million by May 16, on the way to exceeding the total in each of the last three elections," according to the Times. AT&T has been especially generous to the campaigns of every Republican (most notably, John McCain), and all but three Democrats on the subcommittee that deals with the Internet in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. From 1998 through 2009, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable contributed more than $96 million to candidates for federal office, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics (and compiled here). In 2010 they're set to break all records for annual spending.

TWO: Mobilize an Army of Lobbyists

The phone and cable industry controls Internet access for more than 96 percent of Americans. Now, with the help of an army of lobbyists, they're planning to expand that control even further. In 2009, they spent more than $70 million on nearly 500 "K" Street lobbyists.

These agents for hire swarmed the FCC and Capitol Hill in a push to consolidate industry control over the Internet and kill Net Neutrality, the principle that preserves the free and open Internet, before the public (and public interest advocates like Free Press) gets a seat at the table.

Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation recently revealed that cable and phone companies hired 276 former government officials to lobby for them in the first quarter of 2010. Included in this figure are 18 former members of Congress and 48 former staffers of current members of Congress on committees with jurisdiction over the Internet.

THREE: Spread Astroturf

Astroturf (or fake grassroots) groups surface wherever and whenever public policies threaten the corporate status quo. In Washington, they've spread like kudzu to envelope civic discourse over global warming, health care and financial reform in a tangle of corporate talking points.

The phone and cable lobby has been busily seeding Astroturf to kill Internet consumer protections. Notably they've funded FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Arts + Labs to paint Net Neutrality as a "government takeover of the Internet" and to dismiss as "extremists" the nearly 2 million people who have called on Washington to enact lasting Net Neutrality protections.

Their dirty little secret? Most of these fake grassroots groups routinely fail to disclose that their operations are fully funded by corporate special interests.

FOUR: Demonize the Public Interest

Behind every corporate lobbying juggernaut lies a smear campaign targeting public interest advocates.

For these smear-mongers, Net Neutrality is better known as "Internet socialism," "the Fairness Doctrine for the Internet," or simply the cornerstone of the Obama administration's frightening "vision of government ownership and control" over all communications and aspects of our lives. Net Neutrality supporters occupy the radical "fringe" of society, they say.

For Glenn Beck, Net Neutrality is a slowly creeping Maoism designed so that the FCC can "turn the Internet into a public utility, which means they have the power to control and regulate every bit of it."

If the uptick in scorn for an open Internet from the shill and talk radio echo chamber seems a little suspicious, look no further than the companies that still advertise with and support these merchants of disdain. You'll find many familiar names.

Everyone has a stake in the outcome of this fight, whether you're a YouTube "celebrity" or a chili pepper salesman, or someone in between. If you want to control your own Internet experience, you'll need to burst the industry spin, learn the facts about Net Neutrality, and get involved in the fight for open communications.

Now is one of those times that Washington needs to be reminded whom they really work for. And it's not AT&T and Glenn Beck.

As the Campaign Director for Free Press and SavetheInternet.com, Karr oversees campaigns on public broadcasting and noncommercial media, fake news and propaganda, journalism in crisis, and the future of the Internet. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of Globalvision New Media and the Globalvision News Network.

The year in technology

http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2007/12/24/year_end_review/

The year in technology
The iPhone was great, except for its restrictions. And guess who's dialing up a better mobile Web now?
By Farhad Manjoo

Dec. 24, 2007

You'll balk if I label 2007 "The Year of the iPhone." True, news of Apple's new device hit the world within two weeks of New Year's 2007 and dominated tech coverage pretty much incessantly afterward. But as several cynical Salon letter writers pointed out at its launch in late June, the iPhone, cool as it was, failed to revolutionize human relations. "Hey, did your iPhone end the war? No, it didn't, so shut up!"

But tech doesn't work that way. Only a handful of Macheads seriously expected the iPhone to deliver an exit strategy in Iraq, cure AIDS and forestall foreclosure on millions of subprime mortgages. Most techies had lower expectations, and it's true that for some of us, the iPhone didn't meet even those. As a phone, the thing didn't stand out. It lacked, moreover, several necessary features, and more than a few people still can't get the hang of its damned keyboard.

Still, every conversation about tech in 2007 spirals into a conversation about the iPhone; the device, as I wrote after two weeks using it, marks a new way of living. For some people constant access to the Internet is a pleasant dream, while for others it's a dreaded nightmare. This year, for all of us, it became a reality, the unavoidable future.

Apple skeptics point out that cellphones have offered on-the-go access to the Web for years, long before the iPhone came along. But that's a bit like deriding the utility of the internal combustion engine on the basis that horses did basically the same thing. The iPhone's mobile Web is fundamentally different from anything that has come before -- hassle-free, easy to use and functionally the same as the browser on your desktop.

And this suggests the iPhone's true impact -- it forced us, for the first time, to confront the thorny public policy issues that the mobile Web will raise, issues sure to consume Silicon Valley, Hollywood and regulators in Washington for the foreseeable future.

Take telecom policy. Until recently, "network neutrality" -- the proposal to prohibit Internet service providers from imposing discriminatory rules on the network lines coming into our homes -- was an issue most experts associated with the wired Internet, not wireless networks.

We get mad when Comcast or AT&T monkeys with what we can do on the Web at home, but few took notice that cellular carriers have always restricted our behavior on wireless networks -- they dictate what phones we can use, which programs we can run on those phones, and what we can do with those programs. For a long while, the prohibitions raised few objections because the mobile Internet was too useless to get very worked up about.

The iPhone altered our calculus of concern. By illustrating the possibilities of the mobile Web, the phone cast wireless networks as ground zero in the battle for computing freedom.

Ironically, Apple itself wound up on the wrong side of the fight. Among my chief complaints about the iPhone was Apple's policy prohibiting third-party developers from creating programs for it. The restriction undoubtedly came about as a consequence of Apple's exclusive deal with AT&T, which, like other wireless companies, is afraid of wayward applications hurting its bottom line. If you were free to use the Internet phone service Skype on your iPhone, you might make very cheap calls overseas -- and why would AT&T want to let you do that?

The restrictions showed up Apple CEO Steve Jobs' idea that his phone was a full-fledged mobile computer. The iPhone did seem to have the potential to act as a true minicomputer -- but if it remained closed, it could never match the wizardry we're used to on the desktop.

In late September, Apple moved to shut down hackers who had rigged the phone to run in unapproved ways. Many customers were apoplectic. Apple subsequently promised that it would offer a way for programmers to create their own iPhone apps -- a recognition that the iPhone's true utility lies in the innovation that developers across the world will bring to it.

If Apple's innovation pointed to the possibilities of a wireless Web, another company moved aggressively to realize those possibilities. Right, Google.

During the summer, the search firm pushed the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a set of "openness principles" on the 700 MHz band of radio space, a wireless bounty that the government will offer to high rollers at a grand auction early in 2008.

Google did not persuade regulators to make the spectrum fully open, but it did win some benefits for consumers. Specifically, the FCC set aside a block of radio space on which wireless firms will not be allowed to prohibit customers from running devices and applications of their choice. Google also announced it would bid for wireless space, and it unveiled Android, an open-source operating system for mobile phones that will allow developers to create applications that run on a wide range of phones.

Google's not doing these things altruistically, of course. The company sees billions in the wireless Web: More people using the Internet means more people using Google's services.

Fans of the search firm see its moves as a rare instance when private ambition aligns with the public good. After all, Google's gambit has already produced gains for customers. Phone companies wary of a direct fight with Google are now tripping over themselves to bring a measure of openness to their networks.

But how long can we trust Google -- a firm that now dominates every aspect of our digital lives -- to protect our interests? The year ends with that cliffhanger.

When, a decade from now, you think back on these times, you may well remember the iPhone's launch as a mere footnote to a more momentous story: 2007, the year the mobile Internet got its start -- or, you know, the year Google finalized plans to take over the world.

The Beltway contempt for the rule of law

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/14/rule_of_law/index.html

The Beltway Establishment's contempt for the rule of law
The imminent Telecom Amnesty law is but the latest example proving that Washington no longer believes it is subject to the "rule of law"
Glenn Greenwald

Oct. 14, 2007 The Washington Post's Editorial Page, in the establishment-defending form of Fred Hiatt, today became but the latest Beltway appendage to urge the enactment of a special law providing amnesty to our nation's poor, put-upon, lawbreaking telecoms:

There is one major area of disagreement between the administration and House Democrats where we think the administration has the better of the argument: the question of whether telecommunications companies that provided information to the government without court orders should be given retroactive immunity from being sued. House Democrats are understandably reluctant to grant that wholesale protection without understanding exactly what conduct they are shielding, and the administration has balked at providing such information. But the telecommunications providers seem to us to have been acting as patriotic corporate citizens in a difficult and uncharted environment.

Let's leave to the side Hiatt's inane claim that these telecoms, in actively enabling the Bush administration to spy on their customers in violation of the law, were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be "patriotic corporate citizens" -- rather than, say, the desire to obtain extremely lucrative government contracts which would likely have been unavailable had they refused to break the law. Leave to the side the fact that actual "patriotism" would have led these telecoms to adhere to the surveillance and privacy laws enacted by the American people through their Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution -- as a handful of actual patriotic telecoms apparently did -- rather than submit to the illegal demands of the President.

Further leave to the side that these telecoms did not merely allow warrantless surveillance on their customers in the hectic and "confused" days or weeks after 9/11, but for years. Further leave to the side the fact that, as Hiatt's own newspaper just reported yesterday, the desire for warrantless eavesdropping capabilities seemed to be on the Bush agenda well before 9/11.

And finally ignore the fact that Hiatt is defending the telecom's good faith even though, as he implicitly acknowledges, he has no idea what they actually did, because it is all still Top Secret and we are barred from knowing what happened here. For all those reasons, Hiatt's claim on behalf of the telecoms that they broke the law for "patriotic" reasons is so frivolous as to insult the intelligence of his readers, but -- more importantly -- it is also completely irrelevant.

There is no such thing as a "patriotism exception" to the laws that we pass. It is not a defense to illegal behavior to say that one violated the law for "patriotic" reasons. That was Oliver North's defense to Congress when he proudly admitted breaking multiple federal laws. And it is the same "defense" that people like North have been making to justify Bush's violations of our surveillance laws -- what we call "felonies" -- in spying on Americans without warrants.

By definition, the "rule of law" does not exist if government officials and entities with influential Beltway lobbyists can run around breaking the law whenever they decide that there are good reasons for doing so. The bedrock principle of the "rule of law" is that the law applies equally to everyone, even to those who occupy Important Positions in Fred Hiatt's social, economic and political circles and who therefore act with the most elevated of motives.

In a 1998 essay in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Rule of Law Revival," Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote optimistically that the "rule of law" has now become the centerpiece, the prime consensus, for most international relations and has been recognized as the linchpin for third-world countries developing into functioning democracies. Here is how he defined the basic principles of "the rule of law":

LEGAL BEDROCK

THE RULE of law can be defined as a system in which the laws are public knowledge, are clear in meaning, and apply equally to everyone. They enshrine and uphold the political and civil liberties that have gained status as universal human rights over the last half-century. . . . Perhaps most important, the government is embedded in a comprehensive legal framework, its officials accept that the law will be applied to their own conduct, and the government seeks to be law-abiding.

What is happening now in Washington is -- in every respect -- the exact opposite of this. Already, it was revealed that our highest government officials, including the President, broke the law deliberately and for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by the laws we enacted, and all of official Washington immediately agreed that nothing should happen as a result. And nothing did happen.

And now, some of our country's richest, largest, most powerful and most well-connected corporations were caught breaking laws that have been in place for decades, such as Section 222 of the Communications Act of 1934, which provides that "[e]very telecommunications carrier has a duty to protect the confidentiality of proprietary information of . . . customers." 18 U.S.C. 2511 makes warrantless eavesdropping a felony; 18 U.S.C. 2702 requires that any "entity providing an electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person or entity the contents of a communication" without a court order; and 18 U.S.C. 2520 provides for civil damages for any violations.

Here, the Government will not prosecute telecoms for breaking the law, because the government itself conspired in that lawbreaking. Thus, public interest groups and private citizens, including the telecoms' own customers, are attempting to hold them accountable for their lawbreaking by suing them in courts of law.

In response, these corporations are using their vast resources to give money to key lawmakers and pay huge lobbying fees to politically well-connected former government officials to pressure the Congress to write a new law that has no purpose other than to declare that they are immune from accountability for their lawbreaking. They're conniving, literally, to be specially exempted from the rule of law.

And our opinion-making elite is eagerly defending this -- insisting that while the poor irrelevant souls who buy and sell drugs near the corners of their offices are real criminals and those people belong in prison, our nation's telecoms and other high officials, when they get caught breaking the law, should have special laws written decreeing that they are immune from all consequences.

This has become the norm for the Beltway. It is exactly what happened when poor, persecuted Lewis Libby was so unfairly subjected to a mean criminal trial and the possibility of prison -- just because he "technically" committed some felonies. Libby was one of them, not the kind of person who belongs in prison. As Hiatt wrote, in defending Bush's extraordinary commutation of Libby's sentence on the ground that 30 months was just too harsh (while generously allowing that Libby should spend a little time in prison): given "Mr. Libby's long and distinguished record of public service, [] we sympathize with Mr. Bush's conclusion 'that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.'"

And thus, just as they did for George Bush's warrantless eavesdropping crimes and Lewis Libby's obstruction of justice and perjury felonies, the Beltway establishment is now banding together to demand that the telecoms be bequeathed with the legal right to break the law. In his Foreign Affairs essay, Carothers warned of the primary obstacle to the installation of the "rule of law" in developing third-world countries:

The primary obstacles to such reform are not technical or financial, but political and human. Rule-of-law reform will succeed only if it gets at the fundamental problem of leaders who refuse to be ruled by the law. Respect for the law will not easily take root in systems rife with corruption and cynicism, since entrenched elites cede their traditional impunity and vested interests only under great pressure.

Is it possible to find a more accurate description than this of what has been taking place over the last six years in Washington, as the rule of law for our political elites has completely eroded?

If it is actually true that the telecoms did nothing wrong -- if their armies of internal and outside lawyers were actually correct that they had such a strong basis for doing what they did -- then they will not be found liable. They will only be liable if -- despite the best teams of lawyers that money can buy (just like Lewis Libby had) -- they are found by a court to have broken the law.

And "good faith" violations are already exempted from the statute (see 2520(d)), a defense they can raise and prove in a court of law if -- as Hiatt and his friends claim -- it is actually valid.

That is how a country that lives under the "rule of law" functions -- whether someone is found to have acted illegally is determined by a court of law, not neatly resolved after the fact with special amnesty laws passed by Congress that they buy. Here is what Carothers identified as the most "crucial" step for third-world countries to take in order to develop a healthy "rule-of-law" culture:

Type three reforms aim at the deeper goal of increasing government's compliance with law. A key step is achieving genuine judicial independence. . . . But the most crucial changes lie elsewhere. Above all, government officials must refrain from interfering with judicial decision-making and accept the judiciary as an independent authority.

The corruption and sleaze here is so transparent and extreme. We're just sitting by watching as telecoms right in front of our faces purchase from government officials the right to be exempt from lawsuits currently pending in our court system. Government officials, more or less on a bipartisan basis, are about to intervene in these lawsuits and prevent them from proceeding to a determination of whether telcoms violated numerous, long-standing laws. And Fred Hiatt and David Ignatius and Joe Klein and virtually all Beltway "journalistic" opinion-makers think that is the right thing to do, just as they insisted that the President and his aides should never be subjected to consequences for their lawbreaking either.

By definition, our Beltway establishment does not believe in the rule of law -- at least not for them. They are creating a completely segregated, two-track system where high Beltway officials and their corporate enablers arrogate unto themselves the power to decide when they can break the law. They are thus literally exempt from our laws, even our criminal laws, while increasingly harsh, merciless, and inflexible punishments are doled out for the poorest and least connected criminals -- who receive no consideration of any kind, let alone presidential commutations or special laws written for them by Congress retroactively rendering legal their patently criminal behavior.

The Telecom Immunity law that Congress seems well on its way to enacting is one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence yet not only that our Royal Beltway Court is corrupt and decayed at its core. It also proves that they no longer care who knows it.

-- Glenn Greenwald