Network Neutrality: For the Environment!

I don’t think anyone’s ever accused The Nation of being a magazine of sober or nuanced thinkers. But this article on network neutrality is strikingly clueless and hysterical even by that magazine’s standards:

Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that we care about–civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair elections–will be further threatened by this push for corporate control. Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if major political advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that ads from Democratic and Republican candidates were more visible and user-friendly than ads of third-party candidates with less funds. Consider what would happen if an online advertisement promoting nuclear power prominently popped up on a cable broadband page, while a competing message from an environmental group was relegated to the margins. It is possible that all forms of civic and noncommercial online programming would be pushed to the end of a commercial digital queue.

Sounds pretty scary! How are broadband providers going to accomplish this feat?

Beats me. Websites will still be controlled by third party companies like Google and Yahoo, as well as millions of individuals. Ads on those websites will be controlled by them as well. Comcast might be able to block websites whose content it disagrees with, but there’s not much they can do to change what content a given website contains.

Couldn’t Comcast replace website ads with ads of their own before they’re delivered to the consumer? They talk about “deep packet inspection” technologies that allow them to monitor and manipulate Internet traffic at the application layer. But while such technology does exist, it’s far too clumsy, brittle, and labor-intensive to do anything like what this paragraph describes. There are lots of ways to evade such technologies, especially if there are billions of dollars in advertising revenues at stake.

More to the point, it’s extremely hard to imagine that Comcast would attempt such a stunt, as there would be a ferocious backlash from consumers, from web site owners, and from Congress. And besides, what presidential candidate or major corporation would buy ads that are placed in such a sleazy manner? There’s a reason you don’t typically get unsolicited spam for Ford trucks–mainstream institutions have reputations to protect.

The author of this article seems to assume that the Internet as we know it will be replaced with a ComcastNet that only has Comcast-approved web sites. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Who would pay money for such an Internet? How would they explain to the millions of people who read DailyKos, or use Craig’s List, or post to their LiveJournals, that they’re no longer allowed to access those sites, but that there are comcast-approved websites they can visit instead! The reality is that telecom companies just aren’t that powerful, and consumers just aren’t that docile. Consumers are already well used to having unfettered access to the entire web, and they’re not likely to meekly accept it if that access is restricted.

There are some pretty good arguments in favor of network neutrality regulation, but invoking wildly pessimistic visions of Internet dystopias isn’t among them.

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