It doesn’t take rocket science to predict what the craven and corporate-friendly Obama administration wants to do. The president is already doing what he intends to do. His telecom lobbyist-in-chief at the FCC isn’t opposing the Comcast-NBC merger because the president doesn’t intend to. There’s no assertion of FCC authority over the internet because President Obama won’t choose the public interest over corporate interests here either, any more than he has done anyplace else. The president can stall another month, and a new Congress will be in town. Then he can crow a little, but not too loudly or forcefully, about being for internet neutrality again, but how tea party Republicans in the Congress are holding it up. That’s what the president has done, and what we can reasonably expect he’ll do. The question now is what will what was once thought of as the movement for media justice do. Will it hold its breath another year, waiting to be noticed by the president? Will it forget its own problems and come together to re-elect Barack Obama for a second term? After all, Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin are worse, right?

Bruce Davis, Why President Obama Won’t Deliver On His Network Neutrality Promises

The Mushy Middle: Weak Support For Net Neutrality

Craif Aaron, a long-time advocate for net neutrality, bitchslaps the supporters that worry about the debate getting too heated, and upset that other, more vocal supporters are cussing and castigating the opposition.

Craig Aaron, Net Neutrality’s New Enemy: The Mythical Mushy Middle

These sentinels of the sacred center aren’t that concerned about the substance of any given debate, as long as the debaters don’t offend their delicate sensibilities. They specialize in a brand of lazy conventional wisdom that’s long been a staple of inside-the-Beltway political pontificating (see Broder, David). They are the school librarians of our political discourse: No matter the stakes or the truth, they’re just more comfortable if everyone — especially you riff-raff out there called the public — would just keep it down.

Now they’re turning their attention to net neutrality. Like the coverage of any hot-button political issue, their formula is simple and doesn’t require much research: The answer to just about any policy question can be found by simply striking a balance between two “extremes.” The middle is inherently good and always right. If you disagree, then you’re probably an extremist. And then who cares what you think.

Take the example of Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein. When he weighed in on the net neutrality hullabaloo two weeks ago, he did criticize the industry. But he reserved his most biting disdain for net neutrality supporters, dismissing them as “ayatollahs” and “crusaders” engaged in “religious warfare.” After all, they were thwarting the FCC chairman’s effort to “broker a consensus” — a consensus being the Holy Grail for mushy middlers, even better than a compromise.

Since then, “extreme” has become the pejorative of choice for critics of the net neutrality debate, though it’s almost always reserved for public interest advocates and not the big corporations that actually are trying to defang the FCC and trash the foundations of U.S. communications policy.

Shhh … Moderates at Work

Especially worrisome to the mushy middle is that the “extreme rhetoric” around net neutrality could “run amok.”

That’s another hallmark of the middlers: being far more concerned with the tone of the debate than its outcome.

For example, Lauren Weinstein, who moderates a listserv about net neutrality and fashions himself a moderate in the debate, got much more worked up about the “rude” and “over the top” reactions to the Google-Verizon pact (especially that protest in Mountain View) than the ramifications of the disingenuous deal. “I am disappointed,” he wrote on his blog, “no, that’s not a strong enough word — I’m mortified — by the level of vitriol, obnoxiousness, obscenity, and emotionally-laden, hyperbole-saturated rhetoric that is characterizing many of the negative responses to the proposal.”

Weinstein, of course, ignores that the overwhelming public outcry against the Google-Verizon pact is what put net neutrality back on the front pages and - perhaps more importantly - The Daily Show for the first time since the late Ted Stevens started ranting back in the day about “a series of tubes.” People are paying attention, and it’s not because of an outbreak of civility.

I love parsing the nuances of “paid prioritization” more than the next guy. But we’d have lost the open Internet long ago if activists hadn’t sounded the alarm and taken to the streets. Without them, there would be no public debate about Net Neutrality. And if you want to get things done in Washington, you have to come ready for a bare-knuckle brawl — not a pillow fight.

Weinstein did get up off his fainting couch long enough to praise Google and Verizon for the “willingness of both firms to put forth their public proposal,” as if they were just spit-balling some ideas for the public to ponder rather than lobbing a grenade in a heated political battle. But pretending you’re above politics is yet another staple of the mushy middle.

[…]

The fundamental problem with the mythical middle ground is that it doesn’t exist; the search is futile. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go on searching for it forever.

Unfortunately, Internet users don’t have forever; they’re left unprotected right now. And the more deals the big companies can lock in now, the harder it will be to hold on to the free and open Internet as we know it.

This is just another example of the media looking for a safe, moderate mid-ground between two opposing camps, and pretending it exists when it doesn’t. One trick is to attack the ‘extremists’ as extreme without actually parsing their arguments, and then branding them as too far out to be listened to.

Of course, in this case (as with energy policy, ecology, global warming, and a host of other immensely important issues) the opponents of net neutrality are granted legitimacy as a given since they are enormous companies, with enormous lobbying budgets. Their side of the argument must be heard, and they are never cast as extremists. And its always in their benefit to divert attention from the real issues to etiquette and an obsession with politesse.

A non-discrimination rule that bans all application-specific discrimination, but allows all application-agnostic discrimination. Discrimination is application-specific if the discrimination is based on the specific application or content (e.g. Skype is treated differently from Vonage), or based on classes of applications or content (e.g. Internet telephony is treated differently from e-mail).

Barbara Van Schewick, Professor of Law at Stanford

via Fred Wilson

Google Mythstakes: It’s Our Internet, Not Theirs

In a post on the Google official blog, the search giant’s Richard Witt takes exactly the wrong tack in trying to clarify what Google is up to with Verizon on net neutrality. First of all, using the rhetorical device of contrasting ‘myths’ (what others are saying) with ‘facts’ (what Google is saying) is condescending.

And when you dig into it, the truth is that Google and Verizon have worked together to propose a sweeping policy that is a giant step away from net neutrality. They have proposed treating mobile access to the Internet as separate from the immobile web, and allowing the mobile marketplace to be largely unfettered from regulation.

This lines up neatly with how players like Google and Verizon want to run their businesses, but does not obviously accord with the interests of users, or smaller innovative competitors to Google and Verizon, like Facebook, who has taken a stance opposing the Google/Verizon proposal.

I hope the the FCC gets approval to mandate net neutrality before all the oligarchs pay off enough of our elected officials to let this slimy maneuver become the law of the land. I hope that our congress remembers that the Internet does not belong to the corporations who want to milk it for all its worth: it belongs to us, like the air and the oceans. David Weinberger once said that the opposite of open is not closed; the opposite of open is theirs.

related articles

Weinberger: The Opposite Of ‘Open’ Is ‘Theirs’

Weinberger beautifully nails the true value of an open web (or Net): it remains ours.

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.

If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.”

via www.hyperorg.com

This reminds me of piece I wrote last year, Web Culture: Individuality, Belonging, And Scalar Freedom:

[…] people are discovering all over again, that connection to other
people around issues that matter can become the defining source of
happiness and purpose, in a way totally different from mass affiliation
— being a citizen of large and unresponsive country, where ‘culture’
has become a product of multinational corporations, churned out from
music, movie, publishing, and television factories.

Our old dreams are manufactured. Our new dreams must be
bottom-up, like connection on the web, or in wiring within our heads.
If we are to make sense of the post-everything future before us, it
will have to come from our conversations among ourselves, on a social scale in which we feel that we matter.

Post-everything will mean embracing something we know will involve
us, leaving behind our second-class status as members of the mass
audience, and become living, active participants in a new culture.