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delineate 1 percent of gross revenues to fund PEG channels. Despite this, Aaron said, "if you're not already living in a community that has PEG channels, you're out of luck."
Rick Jungers of the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the organization responsible for administering the public-access cable television services in Manhattan, said public access channels tend to support "a lot of progressive community initiatives and life issues, cultural issues."
"It's that one place where people have an opportunity to communicate with their fellow residents using a [video] medium," he said.
Additionally, there is nothing in the bill to stop telecommunications companies from refusing service in rural, low-income and communities of color while focusing instead on neighborhoods that can purchase expensive services.
"That means that all of those people aren't involved in the community dialogue that's on PEG," said Anthony Riddle, director of Alliance for Community Media, a national organization focused on media access. "It's a problem that the people who most need to be encouraged to participate are the ones that are most likely to be discriminated against and not have access."
The bill also fails to force companies to extend Internet access to underserved communities. Although the bill protects "municipal broadband" by securing the rights of local governments to offer high-speed Internet service in competition with private providers, Aaron said the provision does not go far enough to ensure equitable broadband deployment.
"Having municipal broadband would narrow that gap, but those technologies are still a ways away from being ubiquitous and available to everybody," he said, referring to the wireless connectivity relied on by most municipal networks. "The COPE Act has very weak requirements when it comes to distributing Internet services."
Small Fight in a Larger Struggle
With 45 percent of households in the US without Internet access, according a 2003 Census survey, some media activists say a bigger concern is the digital divide that keeps many Americans from accessing the Internet at all, or at extremely slow speeds.
The Census Bureau also found that for households that did have Internet access, a strong socio-economic factor existed for those who could not afford high-speed Internet. The survey found that more than half of homes with incomes above $100,000 per year had broadband, while less than one-third of households with incomes below $100,000 do.
Consumers can purchase dial-up access for around $10 per month, while broadband access costs, on average, $32 per month for DSL, a "digital subscriber line," and $41 per month for a cable modem Internet, and high-speed services are all but unavailable in many rural areas.
Henshaw-Plath said the effort to legally safeguard net neutrality is part of a larger struggle.
"[The telecoms] want the Internet to work more like your cell phones," he said, "and more like your cable TV, where they get to be the gatekeepers where only people who can pay can get access, and only people who don't have controversial opinions get access. That's a very serious issue. But it's part of a larger issue. Net neutrality is one small fight in a larger war of what the future of the Internet is going to look like."
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