Dial-up: retarded badge of honor
The same day the Supremes, considering Grokster, ignored P2P and looked instead at business models, they looked at the Internet in the BrandX case and decided that the manifold Net is not a telecom medium, but an "information service." (Someone fingered Judge Thomas as the analyst who dislocated this bit of reality.)
All the open access rules went out the window. And while this decision was specific to cable, folks like Mark Cooper at the Consumer Fed assure us it will shortly be used to give the Baby Bells the same privileged status. Restriction of open access was unprecedented until last week in the US, according to Cooper, and now, with regard to broadband, it will be the norm.
This is different from Media Concentration, though related. The owners of infrastructure will enjoy monopoly over access to their lines, and their customers have acquired the status of sitting ducks.
Of course bloggers could play a role here. We could renounce the monopolism of broadband. Tell the big cables and Bells that until open access is restored, we'll be fine with dial-up. (Easy for me to say, since I've been on dial up for three months - but that's because I basically refuse to consume cable in any way, shape, or form*). But you know, if nothing else, it could prove (as in, test) the mettle of the sphere.
(*and because I am choosy about my provider, it may be quite some time before I'm on anything faster than 44kbps. But you know what? It's not that bad. I read more, get more done, see more films -- I highly recommend Alex de la Iglesia's 800 Bullets, Commonwealth, Perdita Durango...)
So what does the Blogosphere say? Who'll declare independence from broadband for this worthy cause?
All the open access rules went out the window. And while this decision was specific to cable, folks like Mark Cooper at the Consumer Fed assure us it will shortly be used to give the Baby Bells the same privileged status. Restriction of open access was unprecedented until last week in the US, according to Cooper, and now, with regard to broadband, it will be the norm.
This is different from Media Concentration, though related. The owners of infrastructure will enjoy monopoly over access to their lines, and their customers have acquired the status of sitting ducks.
Of course bloggers could play a role here. We could renounce the monopolism of broadband. Tell the big cables and Bells that until open access is restored, we'll be fine with dial-up. (Easy for me to say, since I've been on dial up for three months - but that's because I basically refuse to consume cable in any way, shape, or form*). But you know, if nothing else, it could prove (as in, test) the mettle of the sphere.
(*and because I am choosy about my provider, it may be quite some time before I'm on anything faster than 44kbps. But you know what? It's not that bad. I read more, get more done, see more films -- I highly recommend Alex de la Iglesia's 800 Bullets, Commonwealth, Perdita Durango...)
So what does the Blogosphere say? Who'll declare independence from broadband for this worthy cause?
posted by Tom Matrullo at Monday, July 04, 2005
4 Comments:
Well, years ago some of us began making the argument that Net access and broadband as well are necessities. Like sanitation. As such, the emphasis should be on openness, not the sort of private ownership found in intellectual property models. Whatever your needs are for high speed, I doubt they have anything in common with the market optionalities involved in choosing "information services."
I share the wan hope. How the very perception of the problem is bent and disfigured can be glimpsed here and here.
Thanks Jon - interesting pointer - I'll put it here again, since blogger comments seem to always screw up links:
http://apseg.anu.edu.au/pdf/apseg_seminar/ap05_suesugi.pdf
The difference between them and US is, they have enough respect for themselves to know that they in general will have the wits to make hay out of something that is not necessarily designed to profit anyone in particular. Where USians (today - it used to be otherwise) only can visualize policy in which in advance it is understood that emoluments will accrue to certain interests regardless of the ultimate success or failure of the stated aims of said policy.
That is one symptom. The whole aura of radical indeterminacy is itself overdetermined, don't you think? It's the sort of cloud of unknowing that fosters big whooping spasms of belief, crowd lunacy, a propensity to make a religion of anything at hand, along with enabling strategic dysinfo. But that's a two-way street. In this environment, were I a news organization, I'd begin with acknowledgement that just about everything we say is a load of gerbil manure. People don't look at what is alleged to be news, but they might attend to someone who admits they haven't a clue what the news is.
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