Victor Pickard is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and author of America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform. David Elliot Berman is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At The Conversation, they write—Cities and states take up the battle for an open internet:
[...] Broadband giants have spent millions of dollars lobbying against federal open internet regulations since 2006. Industry-backed efforts even included funding a network of far-right online trolls to spam the FCC’s website with anti-net neutrality propaganda. These companies continue to want the power to manipulate online traffic, such as charging users and content providers like Netflix to access each other – even though both are already paying for connections to the internet.
This history of manipulation highlights a recurring challenge to the ideal of net neutrality: Governments seek to reconcile the public’s interest in open, nondiscriminatory online communication with the profit interests of large internet service providers. The resulting policies only narrowly target corporations’ manipulative practices, while letting the companies continue to own and control the physical network itself.
Cities build their own
A different vision of how the internet could operate is already taking shape across the United States. In recent years, many cities and towns around the country have built their own broadband networks. These communities are often seeking to provide affordable high-speed internet service to neighborhoods that the for-profit network providers aren’t adequately serving.
One of the best-known efforts is in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which built its own high-speed fiber-optic internet network in 2009.
Chattanooga’s experiment has been an unequivocal success: According to a 2018 survey conducted by Consumer Reports, Chattanooga’s municipal broadband network is the top-rated internet provider in the entire U.S.
More than 500 other communities around the country operate publicly owned internet networks. In general, these networks are cheaper, faster and more transparent in their pricing than their private sector counterparts, despite lacking Comcast and Verizon’s gigantic economies of scale. Because the people operating municipal broadband networks serve communities rather than large shareholders on Wall Street, they have a vested interest in respecting net neutrality principles.
Thinking bigger
A number of much larger-scale public broadband initiatives have also been proposed to combat the power of the giant internet companies. In the 2018 election cycle, Democratic gubernatorial candidates from Vermont and Michigan proposed building publicly owned statewide internet networks.
Several Democratic presidential candidates have announced plans to build thousands of miles of publicly owned high-speed internet connections. They vary in the details, but all are responses to the concentration of corporate control over internet access—both in terms of who gets high-speed service in what locations at what price, and what content those connections carry. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By ‘business’ I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living..”
~~Franklin D. Roosevelt, Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act (June 16, 1933)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Jobs Summit Needs Big-Picture Focus:
Come December, months after it should have happened, the White House will convene a jobs summit. That’s a good thing if we’re really going to talk about all options. Because important ones are missing right now. To that end, I’d like to suggest a few names for the summit’s guest list: Bob Borosage and other people at the Institute for America’s Future; Leo Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers; Carolyn Barthomew, chair of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission; Bob Kuttner, founding co-editor of The American Prospect; and L. Randy Wray, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Research Director with the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. These five take the long view, the big picture view. And what they see – what anybody who really looks sees – is that America’s job situation needs a transformation before the race to the bottom becomes an irrevocable plunge.
The key to that transformation is industrial policy, which includes trade policy and a labor-market strategy. The kind of thing countries as far apart culturally and politically as Denmark and China have successfully engineered to make life for their citizens better. America’s fate now rests in the hands of other countries’ industrial policies. Not having our own is, ultimately, an economic suicide pact courtesy of the promoters of the same policies and behavior that got us into this gigantic economic mess.
While the festering unemployment rolls and the growing number of experts with clout mouthing the words "jobless recovery" may not fall into the traditional category of leading economic indicator, they clearly are a leading indicator on the minds of people who still care about working Americans. And also on the minds of a few politicians who normally don’t care but are pondering the approach of midterm elections.