Bill Moyers is host of "The Net At Risk," a documentary on PBS (check local listings). Visit www.pbs.org/moyers.
The monopolists tell us not to worry:
They will take care of us, and see to it that the public interest is honored and democracy served by this most remarkable of technologies.
They said the same thing about radio.
And about television.
And about cable.
And about television.
And about cable.
Will future historians speak of an Internet Golden Age that ended when the 21st century began?
The Internet is revolutionary because it is the most democratic of media. All you need to join the revolution is a computer and a connection. We don't just watch; we participate, collaborate and create. Unlike television, radio and cable, whose hirelings create content aimed at us for their own reasons, with the Internet every citizen is potentially a producer. The conversation of democracy belongs to us.
That wide-open access is the founding principle of the Internet, but it may be slipping through our fingers. How ironic if it should pass irretrievably into history here, at the very dawn of the Internet Age.
The Internet has become the foremost testing ground where the forces of innovation, corporate power, the public interest and government regulation converge. Already, the notion of a level playing field -- what's called network neutrality -- is under siege by powerful forces trying to tilt the field to their advantage. The FCC has bowed to the interests of the big cable and telephone companies to strip away, or undo, the Internet's basic DNA of openness and non-discrimination. When some members of Congress set out to restore network neutrality, they were thwarted by the industry's high spending lobbyists. This happened according to the standard practices of a rented Congress -- with little public awareness and scarce attention from the press. There had been a similar blackout 10 years ago, when, in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress carved up our media landscape. They drove a dagger in the heart of radio, triggered a wave of consolidation that let the big media companies get bigger, and gave away to rich corporations -- for free -- public airwaves worth billions.
At the core this is a struggle about the role and dimensions of human freedom and free speech. But it is also a contemporary clash of a centuries-old debate over free-market economics and governmental regulation, one that finds Adam Smith invoked both by advocates for government action to protect the average online wayfarer and by opponents of any regulation at all. Read more here
Copyright 2006 TomPaine.com