By Nate Anderson Published: August 03, 2007 - 09:20AM CT
"a small number of corporate gatekeepers" now control the public's access to information, an arrangement that threatens to "invert the democratic genius of the Internet."
"FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is on a tear. He grudgingly accepted the agency's 700MHz auction rules earlier this week after initially lobbying for more open access. The next day, he lashed out at the News Corp. deal to acquire the Wall Street Journal, saying: 'It's interesting to hear the 'experts' claim the transaction faces no regulatory hurdles... I hope nobody views this as a slam-dunk.' And yesterday in Chicago, he issued one of his bluntest assessments yet of current FCC policy. America, he said, is playing 'Russian roulette with broadband and Internet and more traditional media.'
…at the YearlyKos convention, Copps spoke like a man with a fire in his guts. He's proud of America but "worried" by the path that it has gone down with respect to broadband Internet and media consolidation, which he sees as ideas joined at the hip.
In both cases, "a small number of corporate gatekeepers" now control the public's access to information, an arrangement that threatens to "invert the democratic genius of the Internet." When the Internet first exploded onto the scene, people hailed it as a revolutionary communications tool that would allow for the creation of a truly democratic media in which anyone with a message could get the word out to others. Now, Copps notes that most connections to the Internet are controlled by massive corporations who seem eager to prevent any neutrality safeguards from being placed on the networks they manage.
That assumes that people can actually get such connections. While the FCC has for years sung hallelujahs to the idea of a "light regulatory touch," Copps has no truck with the mantra, "Deregulate everything, the market will cure all evil." But he's not in love with FCC regulation for the sake of regulation. He made clear in his speech that he would actually welcome a truly competitive market in which the government could step aside. The reality, though, is that this competitive market is largely a myth when it comes to broadband access. More than 90 percent of all Americans get their broadband from a powerful cable/DSL duopoly.
The issue of broadband access is an important one—in fact, it's the "great infrastructure challenge of our time." Every other industrialized country in the world has a national broadband policy, except for the US, and a majority of FCC Commissioners aren't interested in formulating one. In fact, some of them think everything is hunky-dory.
Commissioner Robert McDowell published a WSJ op-ed called "Broadband Baloney" last week in which he argued that "alarmists have ignored cold, hard facts in pursuit of bad policy." He spent much of the piece criticizing a recent OECD report that ranks the US at 15th in the world when it comes to broadband penetration, a rank that has dropped significantly over the last five years. The Phoenix Center has argued that this is due to flawed methodology, but Free Press debunks those claims, saying they have no effect on the US ranking.
In his speech, Copps didn't mention McDowell by name, but he did claim that broadband in the US is "so poor that every citizen in the country ought to be outraged." Back when then OECD said that we were number four in the world, he said, no one objected to its methodology. Copps also had fighting words for those who blame the US broadband problems on our less-dense population; Canada, Norway, and Sweden are ranked above us, but all are less dense than the US. Besides, this argument implies that broadband is absolutely super within American urban areas. Copps noted, though, that his own broadband connection in Washington, DC was "nothing compared to Seoul." "
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