By: Jeff Chester
AlterNet
October 2002
Editor's Note: The Federal Communications Commission, led by Michael Powell, plans to introduce several important rules that will dramatically undermine diversity in both media content and ownership. These new rules are currently in the Comment/Reply period, which means that concerned citizens still have time to either contact their member of Congress or file their concerns with the FCC. The Center for Digital Democracy's Executive Director Jeff Chester outlines the issues at stake and lists the important questions that need to be raised in comments to the FCC.
The FCC has initiated a proceeding that will lead to further dramatic changes in our media system. It's clear the FCC Chairman Michael Powell and the Bush-controlled Federal Communications Commission plan to end or weaken federal policies that have served as an important "check and balance" system for much of our media.
These changes will have an impact in every community in the US, where there will soon be even fewer owners of TV and radio stations, newspapers, and cable systems. Nationally, a smaller number of conglomerates will control most of the major media outlets. Given the Powell FCC's recent policy decisions on the Internet, the few remaining dominant owners of "old" media will have their power extended to the new online medium as well. In short, this is a huge giveaway of public resources and political power to a tiny few.
The commission launched its "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" (NPRM) on September 12, 2002, with the clear intention of eliminating or drastically weakening several key rules that were designed to protect the public's First Amendment rights to a diverse media marketplace of ideas. This proceeding is likely to craft a new "public interest" framework for communications in the U.S. Federal rules designed to enhance "diversity, competition, and localism" will be axed, likely replaced by a system that basically permits the biggest media companies to "serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity" by focusing on their corporate bottom lines.
In a strange and twisted "déjà vu," the FCC's Notice points to policy findings made by the Reagan-era "marketplace-is-supreme" FCC as the foundation for its many current assumptions. Mark Fowler, Reagan's first FCC chairman, is clearly the spiritual father of Michael Powell. Fowler infamously said that public interest rules for television were unnecessary since TV was just another appliance, "a toaster with pictures."
Like Fowler, Michael Powell sees a media world in which public policies are unnecessary. For Powell, we live in a new golden age of media, in which the emergence of Fox News and other new cable channels preclude the need for meaningful federal policy designed to ensure the public is served as citizens. Indeed, its striking that the NPRM mentions "citizens" only once, and doesn't discuss "civic engagement" at all. Consumers, however, are mentioned more than three-dozen times, revealing the commission's assumption that the issue at hand is whether "viewers" have several choices for TV movies and sit-coms.
Powell alone cannot be blamed for this proceeding, however. It has also been spurred by the media industry lobby, which includes some of the most powerful companies in the US. GE/NBC, AOL Time Warner, Comcast, News Corp/Fox, and the Tribune Company are among those striving to dismantle what remains of already weakened limits on concentration of ownership. These companies have engaged in a tripartite strategy in an effort to remove any federal limits on their size and power. They have often gone either first to the FCC or the Congress to achieve their agenda. Failing success in one, they have gone to the other. And failing legislative or regulatory intervention, they have gone to court.
Over and over again these media companies have claimed that their corporate First Amendment rights are being violated by rules designed to protect the public's First Amendment rights. The media lobby has been spectacularly successful in its legal advocacy, especially with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Given an FCC (under Powell and his democratic predecessor) that is either hostile or ambivalent to the public interest rules, it is no surprise that the court has recently declared some of the rules illegal, and ordered the FCC to review others.
In fact, the entire FCC review currently underway is part of the perverse legacy of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, a law that was principally dictated by industry lobbyists. In what only can be called a doomsday-like public-interest death device straight out of the movie "Dr. Strangelove," section 202 (h) of the 96 Act requires the Commission to "review its rules adopted pursuant to this section and all of its ownership rules biennially as part of its regulatory reform review under section 11 of the Communications Act of 1934 and shall determine whether any of such rules are necessary in the public interest as the result of competition. The Commission shall repeal or modify any regulation it determines to be no longer in the public interest." In other words, the FCC must now document every two years why the ownership rules are necessary, using the standard of "competition" as its framework.
As the NPRM makes clear, Powell is already convinced that there is plenty of competition in the media marketplace today. For example, the NPRM suggests that the availability of new cable channels and web sites is evidence that an abundance of news sources exists, with the implication that the public no longer has to worry about new rules that will permit even fewer owners of broadcast TV networks or cable systems.
The rules currently under review include the following:
Broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership rule:
This policy has prohibited the two most important sources of information in a community-the daily newspaper and a broadcast TV station-from being owned by the same company.
Local TV multiple ownership rule and the radio/TV cross-ownership rule:
These rules limit somewhat the number of stations that any one entity can own in a single community.
National TV ownership rule:
This policy limits the number of TV stations a single company can own. The current limit prohibits a company from controlling stations that collectively reach 35 percent of all TV households.
Dual Network Rule:
This policy prevents one of the four major networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox - from buying another network.
In addition to its profoundly undemocratic, anhistorical approach, what's astounding is that the Michael Powell is proceeding with media industry business as usual, despite the scandals of Worldcom, Adelphia, and the dot-com industry that have wreaked havoc on the economy. It's clear that the claims of the media industry should no longer be taken at face value, let alone believed. A serious independent investigation is required before any public safeguards are changed. Yet with his mind made up, Powell's FCC is uninterested in developing a meaningful record of public discussion. That much is evident from the language of the NPRM itself, and from the research design of the twelve commission studies on media ownership that have been released.
There is still time for the public to respond, however, both by writing letters to Congress urging opposition to further deregulation and support for a meaningful public debate, and by filing with the FCC during the Comment and Reply period. We urge you to read or review the NPRM itself (it's a modern political fairy tale, given its uncritical perspectives on ownership and diversity). But whether you respond to all the NPRM questions or not, you should make your voice heard.
To help, here are ten questions that members of the public might answer in filing their comments with the FCC:
1. How should the FCC measure viewpoint diversity? (The Commission suggests that it should simply be evaluated in a context of commercial competition.)
2. In what ways do locally owned and controlled media outlets such as TV stations and newspapers serve their communities more effectively than chain or network-owned properties?
3. The FCC suggests that broadcast TV isn't as important a source of information as it once was, given the "proliferation of outlets." Do you believe this to be the case?
4. The Commission also suggests that ownership limits may no longer be necessary to promote diversity of expression in the media. Do larger media companies indeed strengthen diverse reporting and analysis?
5. How has consolidation affected the quality of local, national, and international reporting? Has media concentration diminished the ability of the news media to engage in a critical "watchdog" role over private and public interests?
6. Has the so-called explosion in outlets, as Michael Powell would have it, brought about an increase in media owned or controlled by persons of color and women?
7. Has cable television really contributed to program diversity, with real alternatives of genre and scope?
8. Do commonly owned media, as the FCC suggests, have "stronger incentives to provide diverse formats, programs, and content"?
9. Is there truly an "ever-increasing number of alternative providers of delivered video programming"?
10. In determining diversity, should the commission, as it suggests, count every web site and cable channel available? Or should it be more focused on the most powerful and dominant outlets?
Your neighbors are dangerous, and we need you to do something about it. They threaten not only the future competitive landscape of television and digital media, but also the vitality of our democracy. You know these folks very well, their names are on your royalty checks and production credits. They are companies like AOL Time Warner, GE/NBC, News Corps/Fox, and Viacom/CBS.
Over the last decade, these media giants, along with their lobbying organizations, have engaged in a systematic attack on public policies designed to encourage diversity of expression in the U.S. They are on the eve of sweeping away the few remaining rules on media ownership. I describe them as dangerous because of their principal political argument. AOL Time Warner, Viacom, and Fox, for example, claim that their companies’ First Amendment rights are violated by any public policy that limits their ability to own and totally control as many media outlets as they want to acquire. There is never an acknowledgement that these safeguards reflect values critical to a democracy, including the right of Americans to receive a wide array of distinct and diversely owned sources of information.
Perhaps more ominously, many of these media conglomerates now have their sights set on the Internet and the emerging new medium of broadband. The vision that the conglomerates have for the future of digital media is rooted in their past—TV (especially cable). And the danger is that despite the new medium’s potential to offer greater choice and opportunity for both creators and viewers, it may never be able fully to do so. What is behind all the mega-mergers, lawsuits and political arm-twisting is an attempt to ensure that these giants will be able to control and shape the new media landscape.
Over the last decade, cable and broadcasting have engaged in a “tripartite” strategy to eliminate media ownership safeguards. If they could not succeed at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), they went to Congress. And failing that, they went to the courts. Give the industry’s political clout and a timid FCC (no matter which party is in charge), the industry has been largely successful. The following rules are now being considered for either elimination or to become drastically weakened.
Also under attack is the safeguard that has prohibited common ownership of a cable system and a TV station in the same community. The FCC has already decimated the duopoly rule, so that two TV stations can be operated by the same company in a single market. Of course, most radio ownership limits were thrown out in 1996, as a result of the Telecommunications Act. As everyone knows, today two companies (Clear Channel and Infinity) have swallowed up large portions of the radio industry.
If all these rules are eliminated, then one company in a town will be able to control the newspaper, several TV and radio stations, and the cable system. And, of course, there will be fewer owners of most major media outlets nationwide.
The media conglomerates’ lawyers have also engaged in a most successful flim flam before the courts and the FCC. In briefs and filings, the big media companies tell the court or the FCC (and ultimately you and the public), “don’t worry about ending these ‘old’ media safeguards. We have the Internet today, an unlimited source of perspectives.” Why, they say, should there be any limits on how many newspapers, stations, cable systems, or satellites they can own? The ultimate safeguard is the Net. These old rules are superfluous, because many were based on the concept of spectrum “scarcity,” goes their plea. Everyone and their dog, or so they claim, can be a successful programmer today.
But untold to the courts is that these same conglomerate interests now also threaten the Internet. Cable in particular has long viewed the Internet as a competitive problem, with the ability of consumers to potentially access multichannel programming streams elsewhere. The cable lobby quickly developed a solution—fight against any policy proposal that would require cable operators to manage their networks in a open and non-discriminatory way. Known as “open access,” the Internet’s ability to offer fair access to endless numbers of web sites, as well as choice of Internet service providers (ISPs, has been based on this principle. The Internet’s open architecture, its DNA, so to speak, according to experts such as Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, has been responsible for its ability to support innovation, as well as competition and content diversity. This openness has prevented the company delivering the content (the phone company in the dial-up world), from interfering with its delivery. The Net’s framework was based on the requirement that the phone company had to operate as a common carrier, could not own content, and had to serve everyone fairly.
Cable understood that it had key advantages in the emerging broadband world, where TV and digital content will seamlessly travel together. First, it already had a high-capacity wire to most people’s homes. It owned content and understood the entertainment business. But more crucially, cable was still considered by regulators as a one-way TV medium. No open access or share-my-wires allowed, please.
The cable industry is thus positioned to dominate the digital age, especially the TV business (given the end of ownership rules, I mean maybe four companies). They are dictating the technology in the set-top boxes that will be the key tollbooth for digital TV and its interactive successors. Its broadband Internet service is outpacing telephone-operated DSL lines. Cable will be able to bundle its TV and Internet offerings, providing it with a powerful position in the market.
Cable understands that its wires provide the crucial “return path” that is at the heart of the TV business’s future. The emerging model for TV will require the programmer/network to capture data from the viewer/user. Information collection for the processing of T-commerce (TV Commerce, as they call it), whether for a sponsor’s products or on-demand programming, is really the foundation for the next-generation of television. Privacy concerns aside (although important), companies such as AOL and Paul Allen’s Charter understand how the technology and network control will be able to generate huge revenues. And in the absence of a federal open access policy, every content provider will have to pay homage, financial and otherwise, to this new digital monopoly. The cable giants will be able to foreground their content and advertising, giving viewers instant access to those services. Everyone else will have to affiliate, pay fees, or suffer marginalization. The big broadcast TV networks, through their political clout, will have to be cut in by cable. That’s because their lobby has secured both free digital spectrum (now worth close to $300 billion) and a federal policy known as “retransmission consent,” which forces cable to share some of its monopoly space. (The not so-Baby Bells are now lobbying to end their open access requirements as well).
One of the most troubling aspects is the vision that companies like AOL Time Warner, Viacom, or the soon-to-be-wedded AT&T Comcast hold for the future. Despite the technology’s capability to deliver more and new voices, the mega giants see a world, as they tell the FCC in their “public interest” statements, that can offer more “branding” opportunities with “sticky” commercial features. There is nothing said about civic engagement, cultural diversity, or (dare we say) artistic expression.
We need your help, because our country’s new media future doesn’t have to be the old media’s marketing past. There is an opportunity to serve all interests, and to ensure that creators—whether commercial or noncommercial, national or in the neighborhood—can harness their imaginations, passion, and market-savvy. With a fairly run and open digital system, more people would have access to audiences (and maybe even to a profit).
But we have to fight the gatekeepers, the handful of companies and their lobbyists (like the NCTA, NAB, and MPAA). So far, only a few public interest media advocates have been resisting—Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, Media Access Project, and my own Center for Digital Democracy. Needless to say, we are losing.
Very few people understand what’s at stake, let alone make the connection with how the TV industry operates. Since almost of all of broadcast and cable news operations haven’t covered what their company and industry are doing, it’s no wonder that this isn’t an issue on the public’s radar screens.
The Caucus and its members should do more—to sound the alarm, to challenge the false arguments of the networks, and to fund lobbying efforts. We’re mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore. Come and join us.
Jeff Chester is the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit organization working to ensure an open and diverse media system.
www.democraticmedia.org. jeff@democraticmedia.org. 202-452-9898
By: Jeff Chester
Philadelphia Inquirer
November 2002
Some local officials publicly rejoiced this week as the Philadelphia area became the nation's new cable television capital.
The Comcast takeover of AT&T, now blessed by the federal government, is seen as bringing additional economic opportunity and political clout to the region. But it's unlikely that either Philadelphia or the country will genuinely benefit - unless the public demands greater control over Comcast's cable lines and speaks out on how the high-speed Internet and other new digital TV services should serve the public interest.
Although cable is still seen primarily as an entertainment service, leaders like Brian Roberts and his partner Bill Gates understand that it has rapidly evolved into an electronic network that will provide most Americans with access to the information age. So local communities must begin to ask themselves - and Comcast - some tough questions:
Will our schools and libraries receive sufficient connections to the Internet to help educate our children? Will Comcast lines provide additional opportunities for all of the area's commercial enterprises, especially small businesses? How is Comcast planning to share its broadband empire with nonprofit civic and cultural groups? How will Comcast ensure that the benefits of the Internet serve low-income households? How much will schools, start-up businesses, and community groups have to pay to gain access? Will groups traditionally marginalized in the media business - including women and persons of color - get a chance at owning some of the digital pie?
These and other questions must be asked now. The Philadelphia area (and the nation) must begin taking its digital destiny into its own hands. With the long-awaited convergence of television and digital technologies, tremendous changes are under way in the communications landscape.
Neighborhoods and towns that make up part of what Comcast calls its Northeast "supercluster" must seize the initiative. If decisions are left to Comcast and other commercial concerns alone, it is certain that the vast majority of the public won't really benefit. Media giants do a wonderful job at building a generation of passive consumers - but not informed and active citizens.
It's time for the public to develop a blueprint for how the new broadband medium should evolve. Educators, economic development specialists, nonprofit leaders, and concerned parents should launch a digital needs assessment. Once community priorities have been identified - not simply for tomorrow but several years into the future - the hard questions should begin.
It's not just cable that is in the midst of major changes that will affect every resident. As a result of a successful lobbying effort in 1996, each TV station serving the Philadelphia market has been awarded by the government a new slice of the public airwaves for free. With this added capacity, local broadcasters could create new services for children's and educational programming, improved public affairs reporting, and more local cultural content. Opportunities for employment should also be available.
But while these stations plan to create what is formally called "digital multi-casting," the public hasn't been informed - let alone asked - about how these new services can meet local needs.
Seizing our rightful digital destiny won't be easy. One of the reasons groups such as mine opposed the Comcast marriage with AT&T was Comcast's lamentable track record in Washington. Comcast has long resisted any public policy that would provide communities a measure of control over their digital bandwidth. Unfortunately, Comcast and its allies have already won many of these battles at the Federal Communications Commission. We are still fighting them in the courts.
We cannot afford to wait until (and if) the Supreme Court decides that the public interest lies in having a digital medium that places democracy over share price. As Comcast finalizes its business plans for its new empire, communities must make plans of their own, on behalf of the "public interest, convenience, and necessity" that have been the bedrock of telecommunications policy in our nation since 1934.
By: Jeff Chester and Gary O. Larsen
Boston Review
July 2002
David Bollier has done an admirable job of outlining the many ways that the private has eclipsed the public in contemporary American society. Of course, some would prefer to view this phenomenon more charitably as the triumph of rugged individualism, in which risk-taking entrepreneurs, recognizing an opportunity when they see one, capture assets that might otherwise languish under an indifferent public stewardship. Seize the day!—or so the argument runs—and then sell it back to the masses one minute at a time, 24/7.
Of the various aspects of commons enclosure that Bollier discusses, we are most concerned with the interplay of old media and new, in which many of the same corporate behemoths that currently dominate television and cable have now set their sights on the Internet. Recent attacks on traditional ownership-diversity safeguards, for example, waged in the courts and at the FCC, represent an effort on the part of a handful of entertainment conglomerates (AOL Time Warner [AOLTW], General Electric/ NBC, Disney/ABC, Viacom/CBS, and News Corp/Fox among them) to extend their hegemony into the digital frontier. With restrictions lifted on the number of media outlets that any single company can own, those conglomerates will be poised to gain control of the vital "last-mile" Internet connections to our homes. And with a seemingly complicit Congress and FCC (who regard broadband deployment to be much more important than broadband democracy), there is no guarantee that the spirit of competition, diversity, and openness that has long been the hallmark of the traditional, "narrowband" Internet will prevail in the broadband future. Combining cable's closed architecture with the cross-promotional techniques in which AOLTW and Disney excel, the new broadband environment will soon join the ranks of privatized public assets.
Even now, at the dawn of the broadband era, the traffic patterns of the World Wide Web have begun to resemble those of commercial broadcasting. In the first five years of the web's existence, for example, when it was growing at an almost exponential rate, diversity prevailed. But by 1999, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, 110 companies controlled 60 percent of users' online time. Just two years later, that figure had been reduced to a mere 14 companies. And today, with the growing dominance of AOL Time Warner and Microsoft, the democracy that was once the Internet is beginning to look more and more like oligarchy.
There are any number of approaches to resisting these commercial incursions into the "electronic commons," and our organization in Washington, D.C., the Center for Digital Democracy, has recently released a "Twelve-Step Program for Media Democracy."1 But in relation to the "information commons" that Bollier discusses, there is one approach, which we call Community Resource and Broadband Assessment, which strikes us as especially promising.
This three-phase approach looks first at the social, civic, and cultural assets that help define a particular community. These include cultural institutions, churches, schools and libraries, parks and recreational facilities, nonprofit organizations and social service agencies, community-based groups and volunteer associations—all of a community's resources, in short, that are neither beholden to market forces nor derived from the powers of the state. These are the components of civil society that tend to be overlooked in our twin preoccupation with Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. But despite the obvious attractions of those two dominant thoroughfares, we mustn't lose sight of another important part of the cultural landscape, the town square—"our shared assets and civic inheritance," in Bollier's words—which will prove so vital to the future health of our democracy.
Second, if we are to realize the full democratic potential of the broadband revolution, we need to determine the capacity of our local telecommunication infrastructure to serve civic as well as purely commercial ends. Will the new cable broadband networks, for example, ensure open access and nondiscriminatory transport of all programming? Will the more sophisticated set-top boxes that are just now being introduced operate in an open, non-proprietary fashion? Are the cable system's public-, educational-, and government-access (PEG) channels being upgraded for full, two-way digital communications? Is there a high-speed institutional network (I-net), through which municipal and civic resources can be linked? Are there other opportunities for community networking that take full advantage of the new broadband networks? Such is the community broadband assessment that will subject private telecommunications providers and municipal governments alike to public scrutiny, to determine if they measure up to the civic networking standards necessary for our democracy to flourish in the digital age.
Third, there must be a concerted effort, drawing on public and private resources alike, to bring these two forces—our community assets and the broadband infrastructure—together in a meaningful fashion, not as a mere add-on to a market-driven delivery system for entertainment, sports, and endless sales pitches. Instead, the digital commons must be built into new broadband networks at the outset, with open-access regulations, updated PEG commitments, and the necessary funding in place to ensure the ready availability of public-interest programming to all interested citizens.
This Community Resource and Broadband Assessment, then, involves more than Bollier's call for "a reckoning of what belongs to the American people [as] a first step to recovering control of common assets and protecting them for public purposes," however important such an accounting might be. And it is more than merely preventing "the appropriation of community-generated value by proprietary interests," however vital it may be to guard against such misuse of the public trust. The kind of community assessment we have in mind not only takes the measure of our "shared wealth and social life," it also creates a blueprint for linking these assets to the new communications infrastructure, so that they might be shared more widely. Not an easy task, to be sure, but one that we cannot afford to neglect.
Jeff Chester directs the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, D.C. Gary O. Larson manages the Center for Digital Democracy's Dot-Commons project.
By: Jeff Chester and Gary O. Larson
The Nation
January 2001
It's become commonplace to divide the media into "old" and "new," neatly corresponding to analog and digital technology. Under this handy dichotomy the old media (print and broadcast especially) represent mass marketing and mediocrity; conglomerate ownership and economies of scale have produced mainstream, profit-driven programming. Variations occur at the margins, certainly, but even their collective impact pales before the market share of newspaper chains, publishing empires and the assorted television, cable and entertainment giants. In contrast to these old-media oligopolies, the new, digital media--fueled by desktop production and driven by global, networked distribution--seem wildly democratic. So out with the old and in with the new; the World Wide Web awaits!
If only it were that simple. First, the old media aren't going anywhere, and their dominance in our lives--radio and TV usage still outstrip the Internet by a factor of 20-1--will continue for years. Second, the old media giants have made their presence felt online, too, establishing digital beachheads that might not be making much money (yet) but that are certainly attracting their share of online traffic. This is particularly true of the hybrid (and hydra-headed) AOL Time Warner, whose multimedia reach extends to more than 70 percent of all online users in the United States, and fully a third of all time spent online. Thus, even if the long-touted media convergence has been slow in arriving, the distinction between old media and new--particularly with regard to the impact of conglomerate culture--is largely a false one.
That's why the public-policy battles now being waged to rein in the power of the old media (many of them last-ditch efforts to limit further ownership consolidation and to make the media more publicly accountable) are important to the future of the new media as well--particularly in the areas of ownership limits, spectrum management and noncommercial programming.
A combination of successful court challenges and the ascendant deregulatory spirit in Washington has put the existing cable-ownership limits--currently 30 percent of all cable households nationwide--at risk. As a result, we now face the specter of a single company controlling access to more than half of all households. Broadcast networks and station groups (two of which have already throttled commercial radio) are also poised to tighten their grip on key TV markets by acquiring more stations, far exceeding the current 35 percent national audience limit and further eroding local news and public-affairs programming. Perhaps most alarming, the old prohibitions against one company owning both a TV station and a newspaper, or a cable system and a TV station, in the same community are also under threat. In all these instances, the public's fundamental right to "the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources" (in the words of the Supreme Court) will be jettisoned in favor of lowest-common-denominator shows assembled by the conglomerate multimedia stables. There are more media outlets than ever before, but this numerical growth, as Consumers Union has pointed out, "has not been accompanied by a comparable growth of independent, diversely owned competitive communications services and media voices."
On one level, spectrum management--literally, the organization and oversight of the radio frequencies that make broadcast and other wireless transmissions possible--is dauntingly complex. But the current battle over spectrum is distressingly simple: In 1996, the nation's 1,600 TV stations were lent additional spectrum (a six-megahertz slice equal to that over which they've been transmitting analog signals for years). According to the FCC's original timetable, all stations were to be broadcasting digitally by 2003, and by 2006 they were to return their old spectrum (which could then be auctioned off by the government and used for other purposes). For a variety of reasons, the digital TV transition has progressed slowly; in the interim, industry lobbyists have been pressing for stations to be allowed to retain their additional spectrum and put it to various commercial uses, like data transmission, or auction it off themselves. As appalling as that may sound, it is not such a farfetched scheme, given the lobby's clout and Washington's belief in finding "marketplace solutions."
But this kind of corporate welfare is no solution at all. Not only should the spectrum be returned in a timely fashion but a portion of the subsequent auction proceeds should be devoted to noncommercial, public-interest content. Such programming, largely entrusted in the past to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its PBS grantees, needs a much broader mandate in the digital future. And here, too, old and new media converge. For perhaps now, with the additional capacity that digital broadcasting affords, and with funding derived from the spectrum auctions, we can finally realize the original vision for public-service broadcasting, updated for the digital age. As the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television wrote back in 1967, "We seek for the artist, the technician, the journalist, the scholar, and the public servant freedom to create, freedom to innovate, freedom to be heard in this most far-reaching medium. We seek for the citizen freedom to view, to see programs that the present system, by its incompleteness, denies him."
The emerging broadband networks, which promise to bring broadcast and online technologies together in a platform that fosters interactivity and exchange, has the potential finally to realize that vision--but only if public-interest policies are in place insuring that the old-media giants won't be able to stifle competition and diversity in the new-media environment, too.
By: Jeff Chester
TomPaine.com
October 2002
The Internet's promise as a new medium -- where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged -- is under attack by the corporations that control the public's access to the 'Net, as they see opportunities to monitor and charge for the content people seek and send. The industry's vision is the online equivalent of seizing the taxpayer-owned airways, as radio and television conglomerates did over the course of the 20th century.
To achieve this, the cable industry, which sells Internet access to most Americans, is pursuing multiple strategies to closely monitor and tightly control subscribers and their use of the net. One element can be seen in industry lobbying for new use-based pricing schemes, which has been widely reported in trade press. Related to this is the industry's new public relations campaign, which seeks to introduce a new "menace" into the pricing debate and boost their case, the so-called "bandwidth hog."
But beyond political and press circles are another equally important development: new technologies being developed and embraced that can, in practice, transform today's open Internet into a new industry-regulated system that will prevent or discourage people from using the net for file-sharing, internet radio and video, and peer-to-peer communications. These are not merely the most popular cutting-edge applications used by young people; they also are the tools for fundamental new ways of conducting business and politics.
These goals and objectives are visible to anyone who cares to look at the arcane world of telecommunications policy and planning, either in the industry trade press or government documents. The bottom line is the industry want to kill the Internet as we know it.
Take a minute and wade through this bit of arcana -- and ponder its implications.
"The IP Service Control System from Ellacoya Networks gives the Broadband Operator "Total Service Control" to closely monitor and tightly control its subscribers, network and offerings." So reads the Web site of Ellacoya.com, a relatively new firm, describing the business-to-business service that it is selling to large Internet service providers.
Ellacoya is backed by Wall Street investment powerhouse, Goldman Sachs, which sees a major opportunity to turn around the red ink-plagued broadband sector. Continuing, the website explains, "Establishing Total Service control enables operators to better manage traffic on the network, [and] easily introduce a range of tiered and usage based service plans... Talkative applications, especially peer-to-peer programs like KaZaA and Morpheus, tend to fill all of the available bandwidth... The IP Service Control System allows operators to identify, limit and report on these aggressive applications."
The fundamental character of the Internet today is that it lacks precisely these kinds of tolls, barriers and gatekeepers. But technology like Ellacoya's hardware and software is not just an enticing idea; it's more of a silver bullet for beleaguered telecom executives. It's being tested in industry trials and points to the kind of Internet the industry would like to develop over the next few years. The way telecom corporations get from today's open-access Internet to their version of the future starts by changing how people pay for the net.
The broadband industry�s plans to institute tiered pricing have been widely reported in its trade press. There are numerous articles about replacing today�s open 'Net environment with industry-self-described versions of "walled gardens" or "Internet Lite." (See "Cable Operators Seek to Corral Bandwidth Hogs", Cable Datacom News, 10/01/02) The central feature of these proposals is much like telephone companies; there's a price plan for everyone.
To make the case to regulators that such pricing is fair and overdue, cable operators have begun a PR effort, spinning that a small percent of users account for a disproportionately large amount of bandwidth used on broadband networks. They've created and embraced the pejorative term, "bandwidth hog," to describe those -- such as music-obsessed college students -- who find robust uses for high-speed connections. Already major news sources, such as the BBC, and technology journalists are using the term in their reports.
To deal with this "problem," the companies are considering a variety of approaches to ensure they remain in full control of their bandwidth -- unless consumers can afford to pay the hefty access fees. Under a typical plan, a user would be allotted a limited amount of bandwidth per month, and would be charged extra fees for going over this amount. This approach isn't very different from the software industry, where the free versions of an application are intended to frustrate and prompt people to buy the "better" version.
Bandwidth caps have already been implemented in Canada by major Internet service provider Sympatico, Inc., and observers have been quick to note that the limit -- 5 GB per month -- would effectively restrict regular use of emerging applications such as Internet radio, streaming media and video-on-demand.
Consider this excerpt from an article about Sympatico's bandwidth caps in the May 6 edition of Toronto Globe and Mail by reporter Jack Kapica.
A classic conflict has arisen over streaming media, especially of radio. In a recent letter to globetechnology.com, Andrew Cole, manager of media relations for Bell Sympatico, defended the 5GB bit cap, saying that "In my experience, Internet radio stations usually transmit at approximately 20 Kbps. This equates to 1.2MB per minute, or 72MB per hour. At this rate, a HSE customer could enjoy 70 hours of Internet Radio per month and remain within the bandwidth usage plan."But a 20-Kbps stream is considered poor quality by many people who tune into Internet-based radio stations for such things as classical music concerts. For these people, audio quality streamed at 20 Kbps has been described as "pathetic at best, somewhat akin to AM radio" by Tony Petrilli of Level Platforms Inc. of Ottawa.
"Decent audio quality starts at 56 Kbps to 64 Kbps, and really gets acceptable only around 100 Kbps," he said. This alone, continued Mr. Petrilli, "will blow the cap, let alone any other form of surfing, such as looking at movie trailers or even reading Web-based news. Heaven forbid that someone listens to 90 minutes a day of quality Internet radio. That way we'd blow the cap in 20 days.
When you consider the fact that the largest American telecommunications firms are often part of the same mega-corporation with music, video or movie-producing entertainment divisions -- such as AOL-Time Warner -- you can see how an industry-regulated Internet would handily end music and movie industry worries about Napster-like file swapping by people who don�t want to pay industry-monopolized retail prices for content.
Thus, the strategic and technically feasible solutions embodied by companies such as Ellacoya is obviously why Goldman-Sachs was keen to invest in the firm -- as it offers the actual means to monetize the net and turn around the revenue-poor broadband sector.
According to Ellacoya�s technical datasheet, operators can create "up to 51,000 unique policies that can be combined to generate limitless numbers of subscriber policies." Such rules, they explain, can either permit, deny, priority queues, address lock, rate limit or redirect access. The same technology also poses new concerns over privacy, since Ellacoya's technology "collects usage statistics for subscribers and applications, capturing service events, session details, and byte counts.... Operators can 'stamp' the subscribers identity on all records."
Mike LaJoie, vice president for advanced technology at AOL-Time Warner told MultiChannel News, "The way that the HFC (hybrid fiber coaxial) architecture works, we never run out of bandwidth," LaJoie said. "We can always split or do other things that will give us the bandwidth that we want, so it really ends up being a desire to provide the best and highest experience for our customers." (See "HD on VOD Searches for Resolution", Multichannel News, 09/30/02) What these statements make clear is that the cable industry's goal for broadband is to monetize bandwidth. By charging a toll for every bit, the industry can simultaneously extract great profits from the new applications that it allows on its networks, as well as restrict access to those that it finds problematic, i.e. those that compete with its own content offerings. In short, the industry finally sees a way to make money online.
Of course, these calculations are utterly self-serving, ignoring the fact that the net was developed with tax dollars and has been an incubator for an array of innovations that extend far beyond creating new profit centers for big media companies. The envisioned control structures will inhibit robust Internet use by early broadband adopters, and discourage development of new high-speed applications such as Internet-based telephone and video-on-demand, thus slowing overall broadband growth.
Worse, this business model will erect high economic and technical barriers to entry for non-commercial and public interest uses of the high-speed Internet, threatening civic discourse, artistic expression and non-profit communications. In moving to implement this highly centralized vision for broadband, the cable industry does not simply ignore the democratic and competitive history of the Internet -- it is actively hostile to it.
Consumption-based pricing and other restrictive access controls contradict the spirit of openness and innovation that built the Internet in the first place, and will do irreparable harm to its future as a medium for small business initiatives, non-commercial users and democratic discourse. New threats to privacy are also clear, given the intrusive nature of the technology to closely monitor all online use. If you think spam is bad now...
In sum, the Internet as we now know it -- and its revolutionary promise -- may soon pass into the history books. In the absence of public policy safeguards, the emerging pricing and control structures will fundamentally change the kinds of information -- and way it�s delivered -- on the Internet. The ramifications extend far beyond the quarterly reports and shareholder earnings for the nation�s telecommunications corporations.
The consequences are cultural and will affect the pace and character of progress in the early 21st century. If the communications companies impose tolls, roadblocks and dead ends on the information superhighway, they will be robbing public trust resources in much the same way 19th century mining companies pilfered public lands and 20th century radio and television networks privatized the public's airwaves.
By: Jeff Chester and Gary O. Larson
The Nation
July 2002
These days, it's the media conglomerates who are drunk with power--demanding a larger share of the nation's airwaves and threatening to turn the World Wide Web into an electronic theme park--and we're the ones with a twelve-step program. But at least with this particular regimen you won't bore your friends with tales of self-discipline and sobriety. For this is a twelve-step plan on behalf of a more democratic media system, a collective effort to ensure that alternative, independent voices will still be heard over the growing din of conglomerate media culture.
Listed below are twelve opportunities for activism across three broad areas of concern:
Although the Information Age has blunted somewhat the force of A.J. Liebling's famous dictum--"freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one"--the consolidation of ownership across the various media remains a threat to our democracy. The public's right to information and ideas from the widest possible range of sources means little in a world dominated by a handful of interlocking media giants. There may be more media outlets than ever before, given the enormous range of niche publications, special-interest websites and self-produced recordings, but the mass media--more massive today than ever--scarcely admit independent or alternative voices. As the Consumers Union pointed out in testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation in July 2001, mere variety is no substitute for genuine diversity, as the growth in media variety "has not been accompanied by a comparable growth of independent, diversely owned competitive communications services and media voices."
A major component of any effort to ensure democratic media, then, is a regulatory structure that sets limits on the amount of market power that any one company can amass (and here we are more concerned with the "marketplace of ideas," so vital to our democracy, than with ratings points or circulation figures, which often go to the highest bidder).
Unfortunately, many of the ownership safeguards established to protect the public interest have come under attack, and the reigning laissez-faire spirit in Washington, spearheaded by FCC Chairman Michael Powell, does not augur well for the preservation of these safeguards. Thus advocacy efforts are urgently needed in the following four areas:
1. Ownership Limits
One after another, the final few defenses against media oligopoly are coming up for review at the FCC (which recently indicated that it would review all of these media ownership regulations before announcing any specific policy changes). These safeguards include the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban (no single company can own both a newspaper and a broadcast outlet in the same market) and the cable ownership cap (no company can serve more than 30 percent of the nation's cable households) that are under review. Limits on the number of TV stations a network or station group can own (currently limited to 35 percent of the national audience) are also being considered, as the powerful media lobby--lining campaign coffers with one hand, threatening negative coverage with the other--makes its case for complete deregulation. But don't look for this revolution to be televised or covered anywhere else in the mainstream press, since media attention to this issue (which has generated literally thousands of pages of court and FCC filings) has been scant. But there are a number of organizations (including Media Access Project, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America) that are working to stem the tide of media deregulation. For a guide to how to fight back against the media giants, see the Center for Digital Democracy's (CDD) Take Action toolkit.
2. Merger Review
In a legal strategy seemingly designed to set the founding fathers spinning in their graves, the media conglomerates are quick to invoke their First Amendment rights whenever another merger or acquisition seems in order. Any limits on a corporation's right to acquire as much media market share as it possibly can, or so the argument runs, violate that company's First Amendment right to "speak" in whatever venue it chooses. Never mind the public's right to "the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources" (in the words of the Supreme Court). If they weren't finding such a sympathetic audience in Washington these days, such constitutional contortions would be laughable. But as the protracted AOL Time Warner merger review demonstrated (under a different administration and FCC and FTC leadership, admittedly), there will be opportunities for public-interest advocates to make clear the dire implications of the current rich-get-richer, journalism-gets-poorer school of media ownership. Some important safeguards were built into the FTC's and FCC's approval of the AOL Time Warner merger, and we need to demand similar constraints in reviews involving AT&T Broadband and Comcast, EchoStar and DirecTV, and others. Unlike the fine-print filings of most FCC rule-makings, the merger review of these industry behemoths is invariably front-page news, and media activists should take advantage of such notoriety to raise the important public-interest issues--open access to new-media platforms, robust local news and public affairs programming, diversity of viewpoint, minority ownership and content--that will surely be affected by these major media mergers.
3. Spectrum Management
In the range of telecommunications issues before us, there is probably none more complex than the management of the electromagnetic spectrum, the radio waves that carry everything from ham operators and baby monitors to radio and TV broadcasts, wireless phone calls and civil defense applications. Still, a number of spectrum issues are alarmingly simple: Telecommunications and broadcast companies shouldn't get anything for nothing--these are public airwaves, after all, merely licensed for a variety of private uses--and a portion of the proceeds from the spectrum auctions that the government conducts periodically should be devoted to public-interest uses. Moreover, advances in technology--with various digital transmission and reception devices much more finely calibrated than the analog broadcast equipment of old--suggest that additional unlicensed uses of spectrum may now be possible, including open, community-access communications systems. A number of projects are underway to explore these and other public-interest applications, including the New America Foundation's Public Assets Program and NYU Law Professor Yochai Benkler's research on a "spectrum commons."
Thus before we sell off more of the spectrum for the real and imagined benefits of "3rd Generation" (3G) wireless phone service, we should give more thought to preserving portions of this valuable--if invisible--electromagnetic property for civic and other public-interest uses.
4. Privacy Protection
Interactive television (ITV) has been so long in the making that skeptics will be excused for thinking that it will never arrive. But rudimentary forms of menu-driven, pay-per-click television are already here, and with the impending introduction of more sophisticated set-top boxes, ITV will finally arrive at our doorsteps. And along with all of the customized services that it will offer, ITV will also bring new threats to our personal privacy, in the forms of intricate data-collection schemes (often under the guise of "personalizing" service to match our tastes and interests) and "one to one" marketing ploys. Occupying a gray area between cable and Internet service, ITV is poised to slip through the cracks of FTC and FCC oversight (fissures that grow larger every day, it seems). But with a little concerted advocacy work, the same kind of attention that has been focused on Internet privacy can be extended to the new ITV platform. (For more information on this issue, see CDD's report.) EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, continues to play a leadership role on a wide variety of digital privacy issues.
Although the "public interest" is mentioned over 100 times in the original Communications Act of 1934 and its subsequent incarnations over the years (culminating in the Telecommunications Act of 1996), that concept has never been adequately defined. Beyond the vague notion that all broadcasters somehow operate in the "public interest, convenience, and necessity" by the very act of making their fare (no matter how pedestrian or trivial) available to the masses, the issue is rarely discussed. The broadcast industry itself, when pressed on the subject, is quick to cite news coverage, emergency weather alerts, public service announcements and purported "educational and informational programming" as among the stations' primary public-interest offerings. More recently, the National Association of Broadcasters has touted its post-9/11 coverage and fundraising efforts (extraordinary events by any measure and scarcely reflective of typical prime-time programming). For the most part, though, the public interest principle has languished for decades. Even the tepid solutions offered by the Gore Commission in 1998 (discussed in step eleven, below) seem wildly optimistic in today's deregulatory climate, and any effort to reinvigorate the content and culture of the media in the digital age will likely have to arise from beyond Washington. Still, the basic rules of content ownership and the public domain are tied to federal legislation (including the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and any significant effort to fund the development of noncommercial new-media programming will likely depend on federal sources (including tapping the proceeds of spectrum auctions). If we are to realize the full potential of the digital age to deliver new forms of public-interest programming, then, action is needed in the following four areas:
5. Intellectual Property/Fair Use/Open Source
Balancing the rights of copyright owners with those of consumers, never a simple task, has become far more complex in the digital era. The ease with which digital content can be copied, stored and transmitted electronically (with neither a loss of quality nor a diminution in the supply of the original item) has produced a spate of legislative and technological remedies. In most cases, however, the proposed cures are worse than the alleged disease. Such was the case with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with its infamous section 1201 (which makes it illegal to "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work"--even for legal, fair use purposes). As Virginia Democratic Representative Rick Boucher has observed, the DMCA "has moved our nation one step closer to a 'pay per use' society that threatens to advance the narrow interests of copyright owners over the broader public interest of information consumers." More recently, South Carolina Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings has introduced a similarly wrongheaded measure, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which proposes to build copy-protection technology into any computer or consumer-electronics device to prevent any unauthorized copying of music, movies or software. Arrayed against these assaults on consumer rights and citizen interests are a handful of efforts to promote fair use, shared intellectual property resources and the public domain, including Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Creative Commons.
But this battle will not be easily won, given the resources of the entertainment conglomerates. Thus the nonprofit sector, which stands to lose the most if fair use withers away and online information becomes a commodity, needs to be more actively involved in this issue.
6. The "Dot Commons" Online Civic Sector
Neither a particular place online nor a Web portal nor a collection of laudable URLs, the dot-commons concept acknowledges that the same nonprofit sector that we've protected and promoted in the real world, through tax-exemption and charitable contributions, for example, deserves similar treatment in the online context. Thus we must find new ways to nurture and support public-interest programming--from community information resources and educational applications to cultural expression and social services--that is unlikely to be well served by the commercial marketplace. A number of civic networking experiments have been conducted over the years, some focusing narrowly on political participation, others devoted more broadly to the exchange of ideas and information. Still others address such issues as youth civic participation, cultural diversity and closing the digital divide.
What's missing is a national movement to weave together the various strands of "e-democracy"--from community networks to public-access media centers to voter-education websites--and to build a broader coalition involving other parts of the nonprofit sector (including consumer advocates, media activists, social service agencies, libraries and cultural organizations) that have equally as much at stake in the broadband revolution. CDD's Dot-Commons project is a small step in this direction, but much more work remains to be done in this area. David Bollier and Tim Watts's Saving the Information Commons is perhaps the best single source on this topic, with references to a number of organizations and projects worthy of support. The eighty-three-page report is available for download from the New America Foundation's website.
7. New Media Tools of DemocracyThe Internet has long been a boon to democratic discourse, from the free flow of Usenet group discussions to the targeted interests of e-mail listservs. The advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s provided a new forum for civic programming online, a publishing platform fully accessible to nonprofit organizations and individual activists alike. More recently, peer-to-peer file sharing has altered the means of digital content distribution--much to the chagrin of the music industry, to be sure, but also providing a viable model for alternative distribution networks that bypass the bottlenecks and tollgates of the reigning commercial delivery systems. On a somewhat smaller scale, the phenomenon of "blogging" (personal Web logs that comment on and highlight notable websites) has emerged as a new form of journalism, blurring the distinction between producer and consumer that marks the traditional top-down media system. With the growing power of the media giants, however, it becomes all the more important to preserve these democratic traditions online, and to ensure their survival in the broadband era, in which streaming media will play an increasingly important role in the delivery of content. So, too, must the PEG-access concept in cable (i.e., Public-, Education- and Government-access channels) be reinvented for the digital age, taking full advantage of the two-way communications that the new cable networks will provide. Community-based wireless networks, finally, (employing the low-cost I.E.E.E. 802.11b) must also be encouraged as a means of fostering public-access networks. Organizations working on these fronts nationally include the Alliance for Community Media, the Association for Community Networking and FreeNetworks.org.
But much work will have to be done at the local level, where municipal governments, cable franchise authorities, public libraries and community-based organizations need to assess their broadband networking needs and then work together to satisfy that demand. Waiting for the marketplace to deliver these vital civic services simply won't work.
8. New Support Structures for the Digital Age
From the earliest philanthropic gestures of the Carnegies and Rockefellers, through the massive Depression-era and postwar federal funding programs, to the elaborate private funding structure that now encompasses more than 20,000 foundations, we've always found a way to support our analog culture. Now, with a distinctly digital culture emerging at the dawn of the twenty-first century (and with significant portions of more traditional expression to become available via broadband networks), we must find similar means, public and private alike, to support noncommercial projects devoted to the creation and distribution of various forms of new media. In the federal arena, Massachusetts Democratic Representative Ed Markey has introduced the Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act, which, among other things, would create a permanent Digital Dividends Trust Fund, based on the proceeds of spectrum auctions, to support both "human capital telecommunications investments" (e.g., teacher training, educational software development, digitizing archival material and AmeriCorps technology projects) and "broadband infrastructure investments for public access and rural development" (e.g., projects that attack the digital divide in rural and inner-city locations). Based on Newton Minow and Lawrence Grossman's Digital Promise project, Markey's bill would also establish a "spectrum commons," setting aside two bands of frequencies (20 MHz of spectrum below 2 GHz and another band between 2 and 6 GHz) for unlicensed public use as an open wireless platform for communications. But until such time that either spectrum auctions or a new Corporation for Public Telecommunications can channel support to educational, civic and cultural new media, private foundations will need to expand their efforts in support of noncommercial, public-service programming in the digital environment. Ever quick to recommend collaboration among their applicants and grantees alike, foundations themselves must now explore cooperative strategies in order to meet the demands of the digital age.
As Ben Bagdikian has chronicled in the various editions of his The Media Monopoly over the years, the number of companies controlling the bulk of our print, broadcast and entertainment industries has dwindled from fifty corporations in 1983 to a mere six in 2000. Equally disturbing, this "survival of the fittest" (in which fitness is defined by an insatiable appetite for market power) has affected the new media as well. In the first five years of the World Wide Web's existence, for example, when it was growing at an almost exponential rate, diversity prevailed. But by 1999, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, 110 companies controlled 60 percent of users' online time. Just two years later, that figure had been reduced to a mere fourteen companies. And today, the democracy that was once the Internet is beginning to look more and more like an oligarchy. The recent attacks on the traditional ownership/diversity safeguards, moreover, waged in the courts and at the FCC, represent an effort on the part of a handful of entertainment conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, General Electric/NBC, Disney/ABC, Viacom/CBS and News Corp/Fox among them) to extend their hegemony into the digital frontier. There is no guarantee, in other words, that the spirit of competition, diversity and democracy that has long been the hallmark of the traditional, "narrowband" Internet will prevail in the broadband future.
While the broadband era will doubtless bring new online products and services, these must not come at the expense of other, less marketable but no less important fare. There must be room, in short, for the collective wisdom and shared expertise, for civic participation and educational programming, that have proved so valuable to our society in the past. The new broadband networks can help preserve these assets, and make them more widely available, but only if these networks incorporate the open-access, nondiscriminatory principles that have long governed the Internet, and if other policies are in place to share the fruits of the digital revolution with the widest possible audience. On this front, four areas of policy reform demand our attention:
9. Open Access/Open Architecture
In "The Open Access Principle: Cable Access as a Case Study for the Next Generation Internet," Stanford Professorof Communications Francois Bar writes of "an electronic marketplace which systematically favors the providers of content, services or transactions who have a privileged financial relationship with the monopoly owner of the underlying infrastructure.... The infrastructure owner will have strong incentives to configure its network to give superior performance to the preferred ISP and superior service to the ISP's favored partners." With the FCC's recent reclassification of cable Internet service as an unregulated "information service" rather than a telecommunications service, we've moved one step closer to the tilted playing field that Bar and others have described. Thus the principle of open access and nondiscriminatory transport remains as important a public policy goal as ever. As EarthLink CEO Garry Betty recently testified before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the minimum standards for effective open access are as follows:
Coupled with an expanded concept of PEG access--one that takes full advantage of the advanced, two-way communications features of the new cable broadband networks--these open-access, nondiscriminatory transport principles will go a long way toward ensuring that the broadband cable platform serves the public interest, now and in the future.
10. Set-Top Standards
Once described as the most valuable square foot of real-estate in the world, the set-top box that is perched innocently on our TV sets is about to become even more valuable. Infused with microprocessors, hard disk recorders and other digital technologies, the next generation of the set-top box will perform a variety of entertainment, communications and e-commerce functions--including some, unfortunately, that will have more to do with AOL Time Warner's and Microsoft's interests than with our own. Remarkably, some thirty years after they first appeared, these set-top devices are still essentially black boxes, whose simple LED displays may tell us what channel we're watching, but little else. And they remain largely beyond the reach of regulators at the FCC and FTC, who thus far have ignored not only the increasing power and sophistication of set-top boxes, but also the real threat that their proprietary standards and closed architecture will enable cable operators to control the Internet's vital "last mile." Stated most simply, if our mailboxes were as vulnerable to incursion and control as our set-top boxes currently are, no one would stand for it. Especially as these devices become what may turn out to be the most important and powerful household appliance, a review of their capabilities and control mechanisms, and a requirement that they handle Internet traffic in an open, nondiscriminatory fashion, would seem to be in order.
11. Digital Television
Even as the long-awaited transition to digital television seems destined to miss the federally mandated 2006 deadline, the power of the new platform to redefine the television medium remains clear. While it has often been compared to the transition from black-and-white to color television that began in the 1950s, the impending shift to DTV will be far more dramatic. "It is more akin to the arrival of television in a radio world," observes industry analyst Gary Arlen, "especially in the programming realm.... The tools and content of today's digital environment make it possible for broadcasters to reinvent their medium, not merely enhance it." In the process, we must also reinvent the civic uses to which television can be put in the digital age, building on the admittedly faint public-interest tradition that is supposed to govern the use of the public's airwaves. Such was the task of the Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters (the so-called Gore Commission) in 1998, which failed, however, to breathe new life into the public interest principle. Although it included a small number of public-interest advocates (including former FCC Chairman Newton Minow, children's television advocate Peggy Charren and the Media Access Project's executive director at the time, Gigi Sohn), the committee, co-chaired by CBS president Leslie Moonves, was ultimately ill suited to produce the kind of thoroughgoing reform that is so sorely needed if the digital television revolution is to realize its full potential. There's still time to reopen that issue at the FCC, however, just as there is time to demand a public-interest dividend from the spectrum that the nation's 1,600 TV stations will relinquish once the transition to DTV is complete.
12. Universal Service
Extending basic telephone service to all Americans has long been a goal of federal telecommunications policy (and it's a goal that, even at the start of the twenty-first century, has never been fully achieved). In 1996 the concept of universal service was nominally expanded to include the following three goals: "(1) increase access to advanced telecommunications services throughout the nation; (2) advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas; and (3) promote the availability of quality services at just, reasonable, and affordable rates." In the six years since that new mandate was adopted, even while considerable progress has been made in closing the so-called digital divide, little effort has been made to redefine universal service for the digital age. Mere connections to the Internet are hardly sufficient, for that environment (which grows more commercial every day), offers no guarantee of advanced services in the public interest. Fortunately, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 empowers both the Federal State Joint Board, which oversees Universal Service, and the FCC itself "to determine those other principles that, consistent with the 1996 Act, are necessary to protect the public interest." As a start, the board and commission might explore ways in which guarantees of advanced telecommunications services might be extended beyond the current list of institutions--which includes "all schools, classrooms, health care providers, and libraries"--to reach further into the community, via social, cultural and other community-based organizations.
While they obviously come with no guarantees, these twelve steps would nonetheless go a long way toward advancing the course of media democracy in the digital age. The sad irony is that never before have we had such communications power at our disposal, in the form of new digital technologies that allow any of us to be producers as well as consumers of media content. The corresponding danger, of course, is that we've never had so much to lose, in ceding that power to the cable and telecom giants eager to make the new media as monolithic and market-driven as the old. The time to act, clearly, is now.