Dan Gillmor
2007-01-16 08:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

On a late Friday afternoon at the end of December, the new, reconstituted AT&T made a deal with federal regulators in order to get approval for the company’s buyout of BellSouth, one of the remaining local phone giants.

For its part of the bargain, AT&T purportedly agreed to practice “network neutrality” — not discriminating in how it makes Internet broadband content available to data customers — for the next several years.

Some prominent advocates of net-neutrality celebrated the arrangement as an affirmation of their position. But the evidence suggests they got snookered.

Bottom line: If you think the Internet should be just another form of television, the AT&T deal is a cause for quiet celebration. If you think the Net’s original promise is in jeopardy, you’re right.

Network neutrality, which the phone/cable broadband duopoly loathes, is easier to understand as a principle than to achieve in practice. That has led backers of the telecommunications companies’ anti-neutrality stand to insist that we should leave the entire matter to the marketplace.

But the carriers and their apologists also know that this particular marketplace is scarcely open. The broadband companies built their original networks with government-granted dominance in their communities and regions, and have leveraged those networks in the new era.

And duopolies rarely compete over the long term, and in this case there are excellent business reasons for the telecom giants to discriminate in the way they make online content available to their customers. In other words, they have an incentive to rig the game.

The growth of what some call “user-generated content” — a grotesque, big-business-ish way to describe the citizen-created media we can all make with the democratized tools of the digital era — is probably the most exciting media development since the mass production of the printing press. We are on the verge of an explosion of creativity, a time when people can let loose what they know and want to say with few or no barriers to entry.

No barriers, that is, as long as people who get media online have equal access to what’s available there. The key word is “access.”

The telecom companies and their apologists couch media in terms of distribution. They are mired in the traditional media-think that puts a broadcasting model at the core.

They want to turn the Net into just another form of cable television, and if that is the model they claim to have no choice, given today’s pathetic imitation of broadband, to rig the system to favor high-bandwidth video over all else — and to make content deals with favored partners.

If they get away with this power grab, they’ll be pulling off a media consolidation that makes today’s considerable corporate media reach look tame. AT&T’s deal, which exempts next generation services from neutrality and offers alleged neutrality only for a short period with current services, is a step in the wrong direction.

With one possible exception: The fact that the company felt obliged to even agree to any form of neutrality was a positive step in that it acknowledged the legitimacy of the issue in a small way. Media watchers and activists may, just may, have a mini-wedge for future action.

Net neutrality advocates have some friends in Congress on both sides of the aisle. But a majority? Who knows?

They certainly have some wide-ranging support among political activists. While more organizations on the left have been pushing for neutrality, some on the right have recognized the essential nature of this fight.

Which is why I regretted the absence of conservatives at an otherwise worthwhile event late last week in Memphis, Tenn.: the National Conference for Media Reform. There was some ethnic and racial diversity, but for practical purposes this was a conference of and by the left wing.

Organizers told the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper that they invited conservatives but couldn’t persuade them to come. If so, that’s a shame on many grounds.

One of the casualties of recent American political history has been the scary notion that you can’t make common cause with people whose views you ordinarily find repellent. Our system is all about finding allies, but rank partisanship has poisoned common sense.

The conversations at the Memphis conference were useful. But with wider political diversity, they’d have been even more interesting.

Dan Gillmor is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at the Center for Citizen Media blog.