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"It's a shame that the law didn't incorporate net neutrality language," Henshaw-Plath said of the House bill. "That said, there has been no law enforcing net neutrality for the last 15 years, since the Internet was commercialized. We've had, for the most part, the telecoms abiding by the practices of net neutrality."
Speaking of the current fight over the COPE Act, Henshaw-Plath said: "Is this an important struggle? Yes. Does loss here mean that we've lost forever? Well, no."
Henshaw-Plath said telecommunications companies "promised to be good" during the failed struggle to legally safeguard net neutrality under the 1996 Act. "They promised to not implement tier traffic," he said. "And that promise was good enough for awhile, and now they've been talking, 'Wouldn't it be nice?'"
In fact, many telecom executives have publicly and privately stated their intention to force content providers to "pay for the pipes" that load information.
Edward Whitacre, CEO for AT&T, told Business Week in November 2005, "Now what [Internet upstarts] would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it." Whitacre continued, "The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"
Ivan Seidenberg, the CEO of Verizon, expressed a similar sentiment in a question-and-answer session following his keynote speech at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January. He said, "We have to make sure that [application providers] don't sit on our network and chew up bandwidth. We need to pay for the pipe."
William Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth, confirmed in January in an interview with MarketWatch, a subsidiary of Dow Jones, that the company was discussing content charges with Internet companies. "It's the shipping business of the digital age," Smith said.
The schema would establish a dual-charge system for content, with the same ISPs charging the recipient and the content provider for the same bytes of data.
But Sascha Meinrath, a community Internet pioneer, says this double charge would create an artificial scarcity of information. "It will mean that you access certain content faster than other content," he predicted.
Critics say this content discrimination could lead to a conglomerated Internet. Assuming costs for high-speed content provision become truly prohibitive, small, independent hosting operations will lose out if they cannot afford the high costs of competing with the major players.
Several major websites and technology firms have joined grassroots groups in opposing the bill, including Google, Yahoo and eBay. If they decide to fight the major ISPs over net neutrality, telecom giants will have their hands full in choosing to establish a tiered-access Internet.
The Real Prize
Perhaps even more disturbing, say opponents of the COPE Act, is the leeway the legislation gives to companies entering national video franchising.
Calling it "the real prize of the bill," Aaron of Free Press said that in the past cable companies had to negotiate with local communities to establish a franchise. Typical promises from cable companies included providing public, educational and government (PEG) channels that served the community.
But under the COPE Act's new rules, telecommunications companies would be able to circumvent community input and regulation by applying directly to the FCC.
The bill requires telephone companies to match the number of PEG channels already existing, and national franchises must
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