By David Cassel

With all the media heat generated by Congress's plans to deregulate the so-called "Information Superhighway," you might think that free speech for pornographers is all that's at stake. Yet the news media--anally fixated on the dramatic clash over how to enforce "decency" on the Internet--hasn't paid much attention to other troubling provisions in two pending bills that could further concentrate media in the hands of a privileged few.

"The legislation will allow a few giant corporations to control virtually all of the information we receive," warns Andy Oram of Palo Alto-based Computer Professionals for Social Responsibilty (CPSR), a national alliance of computer scientists and computer users. "We will wind up with less variety, less choice and less freedom to express our views."

CPSR's complete report

Resource guide to the Senate bill

Oram, who moderates CPSR's Cyber-Rights Working Group, has authored an analysis of the Senate and House bills that reaches some rather troubling conclusions. According to the CPSR report, released earlier this month, congress's deregulation plan "will do more to hinder development of the 'Information Superhighway' than to promote it."

Specifically, the report warns that the bill will lead to information oligopolies. The danger, says Audrie Krause, CPSR's executive director, is that having information filtered through a handful of large media outlets means "fewer and fewer ways of getting information out that isn't the corporate line."

"It's subtle," adds Oram. "The owner of that source has control over what information you do and don't see. . . Forget [about using] it for any dissenting opinions."

Of course, these trends are already well underway. For the past several decades the concentration of ownership in the media has been growing steadily. Corporate mergers like the Time-Warner and ABC-Cap Cities-Disney marriages have become commonplace events in recent years.

"The trend toward concentration of ownership that we've seen over the last 20 years will be incredibly exacerbated" under the provisions of these bills, says Rheingold, the Mill Valley author and futurist. He puts it in plain terms: "If you think it's unhealthy for one person to own the newspaper, the TV stations, and the cable franchises in one area, then you should think it's a bad bill."

For instance, the study warns that mergers are permitted unless a community has more than 50,000 residents, and that individuals are allowed to own an unlimited number of radio stations.

Of course, this is all moot if "citizen-based" communications models fulfill their promise and supplant the mass media altogether. But barring that optimistic outcome, the formation of broadcasting monoliths gives large corporations an incredible amount of leverage--and control.

As Krause sees it, the problem with the bill is clear: "The model that's being pushed and hyped is a commercial model," an instrument that will "simply give markets another tool for invading our privacy and getting a buck out of us."

Critics of the legislation (and Bill Clinton is among them) note that the Republican Congress snuggled up to lobbyists from the largest media and telecommunications corporations while writing the bill. "Congress knew pretty well the ways that different companies can be anti-competitive or abuse monopoly positions," says Oram. "And I think they got the bill 70 percent right. But there's a lot they can do in the [remaining] 30 percent."

Rheingold is more direct. "They carved up the territory, as far as we know." He cites closed-door meetings between congressional leaders and the telecommunications industry. "Deals have been made," he says. There's big money at stake." According to Rheingold, lobbyists for the telecommunications companies have reported spending $10 million dollars to influence the legislation.

But lopsided political pressure from telcos is only one of the legisilation's problems, according to digital activists. The CPSR paper also warns that the bill will increase the rates charged for information services. Although there currently is little competition in a communications industry that is divided into government-sanctioned fiefdoms, it's possible that gigantic companies, once deregulated, could create private-sector monopolies via merger mania.

And Oram's paper also notes that the bill removes virtually all regulations on "upper-tier" services that aren't part of basic service packages--as in premium cable channels. To escape regulation, an information provider need only classify an offering as "upper tier." And what's considered upper tier, is in the eye of the cable conglomerate.

Another section of the CPSR paper cautions that the bill may widen the gap between the poor and uneducated, by leaving "loopholes in the universal service guarantee" that was the cornerstone of Congress's 1934 communications act.

"If you can't afford to have a computer or pay charges for an online access, you're disadvantaged," Krause points out. "If this is how people can exchange information that isn't censored by corporate commercial entities, that's a real disadvantage to people who can't afford" a modem and computer.

Berkeley database expert and CPSR member Karen Coyle agrees. She is preparing a CPSR paper on the issue of universal access. "If we profess to be a democracy," she says, "then that means that people have to communicate. Their ideas have to be available to all. If you commercialize the ability to share that knowledge, you greatly change how society develops, who gets to have an influence."

Rheingold concurs, arguing that the power to influence is "more important than guns," and as important as "a constitutional convention."

So how did a bill so bad get this far? Because, says Rheingold, "most American citizens are ignorant about it." He attributes this lack of knowledge to "a massive failure of American journalism."

Citing the media's focus on high-profile news stories, Rheingold notes that "every column inch and every prime-time minute that was devoted to stupid 'Sex Online' and 'Porno on the Internet' stories was a column inch and a prime-time minute that was not spent explaining to American citizens that drastic changes are being made in the rules of communications."

Karen Coyle is even more cynical: "I'm sure that the people who are going to be voting on this don't know any more about it than you or I. If we don't maintain the basic freedoms that we use when we communicate, thirty years from now, if they're gone, they're gone for good."

[ CyberScape | MetroActive Central ]