Changing The Rules Of The Internet Game

For most of us, it is hard to gauge the full effect of information technology on our lives because the technology itself is moving so quickly. It is changing the way we relate to the world through our email and web browsers, our cell phones and BlackBerries, our iPods and televisions. The connections we have forged with each other through all of these devices have been facilitated by the wide open model of the Internet that allows content providers to meet content consumers unimpeded.

The consequences of this model have transformed our lives in ways that might be difficult to explain to our children. Try telling them about trudging off to the library to research a term paper using the Reader’s Guide To Periodic Literature, or begging your parents for a trip to the mall to buy a record. And if you have stories about carbon paper, you’re probably ready for carbon dating.

Inevitably, all the freewheeling personal interaction fostered by the Internet led to commercial relationships, and those relationships have been multiplying across the web at an astounding rate. First quarter retail sales statistics for 2006 (US Census data) show an overall increase of 8.1 percent over the same quarter last year. For e-commerce sales, however, the increase was over 25 percent. In the first three months of this year, more than $25.2 billion in goods and services have been purchased online. With that much money in play, the big boys now not only want a seat at the table, they want to change the rules of the game.

This week, AT&T won permission from Connecticut’s Department of Public Utility Control to offer video over its phone lines without having to seek a cable franchise, positioning itself to compete with cable and satellite companies in offering broadband services, including digital video. Concurrently, the cable companies and major telecom companies, including AT&T were trying to push a major telecommunications bill through the House and Senate this week in Washington, D.C., that would allow them to charge a premium to content providers offering broadband services including video that might rival their own products.

We should remember that 60 percent of the content on the World Wide Web is produced not by corporations but by ordinary people, including artists, bloggers, amateur filmmakers, independent bands, and start-up entrepreneurs — many of them right here in Newtown — going directly to an audience hoping one day to make it big.

The corporations that provide the “pipes” through which Internet content flows already charge consumers for access either directly or indirectly through Internet service providers. Now they want the unfettered right to charge extra fees to the content providers at the other end of the pipe, imposing themselves as gatekeepers and toll collectors on the information superhighway with sole rights for determining who gets premium treatment and who doesn’t. Sadly, it appears that Congress is willing to let them get away with it.

If this had been the model for doing business on the Internet from the start, would there be a Google, or a Yahoo, or an eBay? We doubt it. The Internet would look a lot like cable TV — lots of channels and not much to watch. But maybe we wouldn’t notice, because we would all be at the library waiting in line for the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature.