As the tail lengthens, Big Media are starting to panic. In this regard, the canary in the coal mine is the music industry, which is going after everyone from high-school and college students who download music from those peer-to-peer networks that haven’t yet been sued out of existence to the meager earnings of Internet radio stations in an attempt to shore up its once-guaranteed monopoly profits.
It could get a lot worse. Not long ago, the idea that corporations could use their power to gain control of the Internet might have sounded ridiculous. The Internet, after all, is an open platform, with a capacity that is, for all practical purposes, infinite. Even with the media giants’ setting up vast websites and pulling in huge numbers of eyeballs, there was nothing to stop ordinary citizens from pursuing their own projects. Right?
Well, sort of. In fact, the Internet may not be as impervious to the depredations of Corporate America as we might have thought. In his book Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy, published earlier this year, veteran media activist Jeff Chester traces the long, dispiriting history of media regulation in the United States and predicts that, if we’re not careful, the Internet — like radio and television before it — will be handed over to business interests by elected officials dependent on their campaign contributions and by regulators hoping for lucrative industry careers once they leave government service.
But wait — didn’t radio and television fall into corporate hands because of a simple law of physics? Didn’t hopes for a democratic broadcasting regime fall victim to the reality that there are only so many broadcasting frequencies out there? How is that even remotely comparable to the Internet and its limitless capacity?
The argument Chester makes is that we should stop thinking about the Internet as it is and instead focus on the much faster Internet of the future — an Internet supercharged with fiber optics, capable of delivering broadcast-quality television, full-length movies, and all sorts of content well beyond the capacity of today’s cable and DSL connections. This is the Internet that could be closed off and reserved for corporate content. Or, as AT&T chief executive Ed Whitacre memorably put it in 2005, “Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”
In return for bringing the next-generation Internet online, the telecommunications companies want to be allowed to do away with “net neutrality” — that is, to be allowed to charge content-providers a premium to take advantage of the faster speeds. Such a two-tiered arrangement would relegate nonprofits, community-based sites, lone bloggers, and the like to the slow lane — and, eventually, to oblivion, as users would come to see them as too retro and too frustratingly slow to bother with.
The Internet is the single greatest threat to corporate dominance of the media since the industrial model was established a century and a half ago. It would be naïve to think that these corporations wouldn’t fight back. In so doing, they are embracing (as Neil Postman predicted they would) not the strategy of Orwell’s 1984, but of Huxley’s Brave New World. By ensuring that all the latest, richest, coolest content is on the new, high-speed, corporate-controlled Net, they’ll deprive the independent sites of the oxygen they need to survive. And we’ll be so overloaded with entertainment that we won’t care.
