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Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Attacks on 'Net Neutrality' Hurt Internet Growth
By Rick Carnes
President, Songwriters Guild of America
There's a fight going on over a crucial part of our national future. The outcome will determine whether America maintains what for many of our industries is the crucial foundation for our economic growth, which means jobs for New Mexico and the nation.
No, this is not about any elections or Afghanistan or Iraq. Instead, it is about the Internet and whether federal policy will continue promoting a first-class system capable of handling the increasing demands we place on it.
Those in favor of this include the nation's largest labor unions, manufacturers, experts who helped create the Internet and civil rights advocates who rightly demand better, faster, more affordable broadband access to heal the Digital Divide.
This group also includes my organization, the Songwriters Guild of America. We represent the songwriters who try to create music that is compelling, interesting and sometimes provocative. A few songwriters are famous, but most face the same tough choices and economic realities of families across America.
For us, the development of universal and affordable high-speed Internet service system — tomorrow's Internet — holds the promise not only of a vast new audience but also new, desperately needed digital business models.
For many songwriters, the rise of today's Internet and new services like Pandora have been a blessing. But there have also been serious problems as traditional music distribution was upended, piracy became rampant and songwriters were caught in a tug-of-war between giant corporations and ordinary Net users we hoped to convince to pay at least something for our music.
So who's on the other side? On Tuesday there was to be a public hearing in Albuquerque co-hosted by Free Press, Center for Media Justice and the Media Literacy Project. These groups seem dedicated to yesterday's thinking about the way the Internet has traditionally operated.
At the hearing these groups were to discuss something called net neutrality which would result in an unprecedented federal expansion over the Web that would treat broadband the same way as traditional wired phone service was treated circa 1934, undercutting our ability to have a first-class, affordable online experience, and raising serious concerns about freedom of speech on the Internet since the censorship-friendly FCC would be doing the regulating.
Net neutrality is based on the idea that every byte of data traveling across the network needs to be treated identically. The massive e-mail dump from an online Viagra dealer is treated the same as the music video you're trying to stream. It goes against many of the Internet's earliest engineering decisions, which recognized that prioritizing certain data would create huge efficiencies of scale that in turn meant more affordable access.
We Democrats are supposed to be the party of jobs. On technology issues, we're supposed to be working constructively to build a digital economy that creates jobs.
When it comes to Internet policy, there is broad agreement that Net users should have the freedom to go anywhere they want on the web and access their choice of paid or free legal content. These protections could have been enacted years ago were it not for a vocal minority led by Free Press pushing for far more extreme measures subjecting the Internet to a class of regulation from the last century that prevents the Internet from evolving to meet tomorrow's creativity.
In fact, Free Press has attacked the president, calling him and his administration "crash test dummies." And they have bitterly attacked labor unions, which have correctly questioned whether Net neutrality would cost union jobs.
These attacks undercut the ability for rational discussion of something as important as closing the Digital Divide or spurring Internet growth.
As a Democrat, I believe that now more than ever, the American people need to hear a positive, unified economic message. The Internet is the foundation for much of our future prosperity. This is no time to tie it down in pointless regulation just to satisfy the fundraising needs of a fringe group that doesn't understand the economic harm that would come from what they propose.
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