Earlier this month the federal Senate Judiciary Committee opted not to consider Senator Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA) until after the midterm elections. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties nonprofit group, responded to the news by posting an article titled, “Victory: Internet Censorship Bill is Delayed, For Now.” The COICA bill, which the article referred to as “dangerously flawed,” would allow the Attorney General and the federal Department of Justice to require domain registries to block users from accessing certain websites. It would also allow the Department of Justice to blacklist domain names without judicial review that are “dedicated to infringing activities.”
“COICA would make the net non-neutral, by treating Internet traffic differently,” said Rebecca Jeschke, Media Relations Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The Internet allows anyone with a good idea — whether that is a new product or a new political theory or a new short film or something else entirely — to have an audience of millions,” she said. “This is a wonderful development.Without a neutral Internet, this wonderful transformative tool becomes much less useful.”
But what is a “neutral Internet?”
“Net neutrality” refers to the struggle to secure legal regulations that say service providers cannot filter access to and information on the Internet. If obtained, net neutrality would insure that Internet providers would be obligated to provide equal access to online resources rather than attempting to syndicate their control over those resources.
In the past Internet providers have proven that without government regulation they will use their power over the public’s access to the Internet for capital gain. Back in 2005 Comcast blocked its users from sharing BitTorrents, a way of digitally sharing and receiving large files. This startled customers and legislators alike to realize that Internet providers could censor or even ration the websites available to their customers. In parts of the country where the infrastructure for high-speed Internet is not yet established, service providers have been able to limit communities’ access to the World Wide Web. One example of a Philadelphia housing project had residents unable to get online unless they also paid for Verizon’s expensive digital phone service.
While it was the Federal Commuications Commission (FCC) who originally fought Comcast on its BitTorrents restrictions, digital rights activists do not trust the flimsy-judicial pull of the FCC to secure and protect net neutrality for the public. The FCC is said to be too susceptible to regulatory capture, aka: indirect control and influence from the legions of corporate lobbyists and intra-industry politics. They say that there needs to be a barrier of steadfast and specific laws insulating the public’s access to unregulated web content so that Internet providers are unable to create miniature monopolies of regulated information.
Equal and neutral Internet access is especially crucial to working class and underprivileged communities, said Jeschke. Communities previously without political visibility or abundant financial resources have been able to utilize the Internet to engage in the democratic process in unprecedented ways, garnering wide-spread attention for local social justice issues and presenting a diversity of alternative narratives. “In the old days, you needed a printing press or access to a TV or radio network to speak to millions of people,” said Jeschke. “You don’t need that anymore, because of the Internet. If the net neutrality battle ended with less reach for everyday folk to blog and post videos on the Internet, it would be a terrible shame.”
When stripped down to its bare bones, the fight for net neutrality is the age-old story of the public’s grassroots crusade to retain equal access to public resources while lobbyists and CEOs are grappling to micromanage those resources for profit. According to Karlos Schmieder, a communications specialist at the Center for Media Justice based in Oakland, only 38 percent of African Americans and fewer than half of all Latinos have broadband Internet. “This gap represents far more than a digital divide,” said Schmieder. “It is a reflection of the gaps in wealth, education, and enfranchised democracy our movement works so hard to close. There are some serious threats to securing fair rules of the road on the Internet.”
“[Telecommunications companies] are spending millions to lobby congress and some advocacy and civil rights groups to create a false choice between broadband investment in our communities and our online communication rights,” Schmieder continued. “At stake is access to a communications system that has the potential to be the most powerful, creative and democratic of our time. We’ve already subsidized phone, cable and internet companies with our public dollars, we refuse to further subsidize them our human rights. Just as our communities in Arizona used internet to bypass bias of mainstream media, every community of struggle deserves the right of self-representation which can only be secured by codifying rules that prevent companies from discriminating or redlining for profit online.”
From the educational to the political, to the routine uses of the Internet, there is too much at stake for the public not to be concerned about the ongoing fight for net neutrality. “In Latino communities we must demand a framework for high-speed internet broadband policy that ensures equity and justice,” said Schmieder. Such a framework would include direct broadband subsidies to low-income households, schools, and libraries. It would also protect particularly vulnerable consumers, such as those using broadband to call their loved ones in prison or in other countries. According to Schmieder, securing a protected framework of internet access has the potential to “codify free speech for those for whom that right has been denied.”
What steps do digital rights activists like Jeschke recommend the general public take to actively safeguard the right to net neutrality?
Only one: “Follow the debate closely,” she said. “This is a very hard thing to do correctly, so we need to be vigilant.”
For more information, go to CMJ online action network (http://centerformediajustice.org/action-center/join-the-movement/) and Latinos for Internet Freedom (http://latinonetlibre.com)