By: Jeff Chester and Gary O. Larsen
The American Prospect
January 2000
With apologies to Walt Whitman, whose "barbaric yawp" anticipated Internet chat groups and the World Wide Web by well over a century, the information superhighway may turn out to be nothing like the open road that the poet celebrated in 1856. That transcendent pathway, according to Whitman, held out the promise of boundless possibilities, countless destinations: "The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose."
Not so the latter-day, digital counterpart of the open road, at least not in its newest broadband incarnation. As the system is now shaping up, the most popular means for Americans to access the Internet from their homes in coming decades seems likely to be through high-speed cable networks. But if the cable industry has its way--and under current regulations it will--cable Internet access will turn out to be as tightly controlled as cable television has been. Instead of a democratic, participatory medium, the new high-speed Internet will have the same top-down control that has long limited broadcast and cable television.
At present, the vast majority of Americans with online access (about one-third of all households) use standard dial-up connections to one of more than 6,000 Internet service providers (ISPs). With some 18 million subscribers, America Online (AOL) may dominate the field, but the ISP market, in the words of The New York Times's Matt Richtel, "remains a diverse industry with wide-open possibilities for competition, including mom-and-pop operations." The future of this market, however, clearly belongs to companies that can provide much faster connections than standard dial-up service, now at 56 kilobytes per second (kbps). Telephone companies are already beginning to offer faster access through the new digital subscriber line (DSL) service, using existing copper wire to reach speeds of up to six megabytes per second (mbps), or roughly 100 times the rate of standard dial-up connections. Satellite operators, wireless services, and utility companies will also be vying to establish high-speed connections to the home. But the leading candidate, given its current presence in two-thirds of all American homes, is the cable industry, which is upgrading its systems to accommodate two-way, broadband Internet access, at speeds of up to 100 times that of today's conventional telephone access and theoretically up to 10 mbps, or two-thirds faster than DSL.
Unfortunately, the world of cable Internet offers nowhere near the choice of service that dial-up users enjoy. Instead of choosing from a full menu of ISP options, broadband customers will be forced to subscribe to a service provider of the cable company's choosing. Those who want to continue to use another ISP (perhaps a local provider that specializes in community news and information or one that offers Web hosting and technical assistance) will have to pay twice--first for the proprietary cable system, and then for the ISP.
More important, the architecture of the new broadband networks will give unprecedented control to the cable ISP, making possible tiered levels of service that will discriminate according to the nature of the content, the affiliation of the sender, or the fee-paying status of the recipient. The cable company's own content, for example, along with that of its sponsors and business partners, will get preferential treatment, while competitive or unaffiliated programming will be relegated to the slower lanes. The cable ISP's menu of programming and the "portal" through which the user ventures into cyberspace will similarly favor some brands of programming at the expense of others.
In short, the "open road" of the Internet could well become an obstacle course for any service outside the favored brands. Over the past year, anticipating the commercial potential of broadband, AT&T has spent more than $100 billion to acquire two of the largest cable companies, TCI and MediaOne, giving it direct connections to some 16 million homes (one-fourth of all cable households) and, through various partnerships and affiliations, access to many more. Currently bound through June 2002 by exclusive IS contracts with ExciteHome (a company in which it owns a majority stake), AT&T recently announced an "agreement in principle" with MindSpring Enterprises, the nation's second largest ISP, to open its new cable networks to competitive ISPs. But that "agreement" (which three of the six negotiating parties refused to sign) raised many more questions than it answered: How many ISPs will be allowed to participate, and will they be treated equitably? Will existing content restrictions and transport controls remain in place? Will AT&T retain control of all customer accounts? It is unclear, in other words, whether a single company will in fact be permitted to dominate what is likely to be the nation's most important communications medium in the twenty-first century.
How, it might well be asked, did we arrive at this troubling state of affairs, with a broadband monopoly looming on the horizon? Curiously, regulators have given AT&T the green light in the interest of competition--or so the arguments run. But those who have a different view may still be able to make their voices heard in what could be the single most important battle over the future of communications.
The New Open-Access Movement
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
He going with me must go well arm'd ...--Song of the Open Road
By all accounts, the "open access" fray has been one of the most expensive, hotly contested policy disputes since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Executives and lawyers involved in the case, according to the Times, estimate that interest-group spending is already in the tens of millions of dollars. Nominally pitting AT&T versus AOL (since these are the two companies with the most at stake), the broadband battles will have no less of animpact on the millions of Americans who connect to the Internet from their homes.
Currently, fewer than a million subscribers have cable Internet service, and about 650,000 customers have DSL. But the broadband market is expected to grow rapidly, reaching more than 11 million households by the end of 2002, according to Jupiter Communications. Although AT&T seems to have the inside track in the race to control broadband, it still has to clear a number of hurdles, and there are some signs of trouble. The company has encountered strong opposition to its cable broadband plans in several communities in Oregon, Florida, and California where it has had to negotiate local franchise agreements to complete its TCI and MediaOne acquisitions.
The city of Portland, Oregon, and surrounding Multnomah County led the way in the spring of 1999 when authorities there voted to require AT&T to open its cable network to Internet competitors. In response, AT&T sued the city and lost in federal court in June, and the case is now on appeal in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. In the meantime, the commissioners of Broward County, Florida, arrived at a similar conclusion as did their counterparts in Portland. They required AT&T to open the cable network it acquired from MediaOne (which had already begun to offer cable Internet service under its Road Runner banner). More recently, authorities in St. Louis, Missouri, and Cambridge and Weymouth, Massachusetts, voted to require open access, while those in Sacramento, California, rejected it. The matter is still pending in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The open-access movement gained momentum in July, when the National Association of Counties (NACo), representing 1,800 county governments across the country, passed a resolution in support of open access at its annual meeting in St. Louis. "It is essential," the NACo resolution declared, "that local government franchise authorities have the authority to require that all cable companies provide open access to all Internet service providers."
The struggle over open access, however, will likely be resolved at the federal level, through legislation, rule making by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), or both. But neither Congress nor the FCC is moving quickly, and the entire debate in Washington is enveloped in a thick ideological and rhetorical fog.
Market Rhetoric in the Service of Monopoly
Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove
at all under the spacious clouds and along the
landscape and flowing currents.--Song of the Open Road
FCC Chairman William E. Kennard is fond of referring to his agency's "unregulation" of the Internet. "The best decision government ever made with respect to the Internet," Kennard told the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) at its annual meeting in June, "was the decision that the FCC made 15 years ago not to impose regulations on it." Precisely the same philosophy, according to Kennard, guided the agency in its approach to the emerging field of high-speed telecommunications: "[W]ith competition and deregulation as our touchstones, the FCC has taken a hands-off deregulatory approach to the broadband market. We approved the AT&T-TCI deal without imposing conditions that they open their network."
The leading alternative to this hands-off approach is a framework that would enable ISPs to gain nondiscriminatory access to the new cable networks--not free access, but simply access under the same terms and conditions that the cable companies extend to their affiliated ISPs. Chairman Kennard declares that "it is the FCC's job to implement and cultivate this competitive environment; to open up previously closed marketplaces to competitors; and to set the framework for a vigorous competition." Nonetheless, he has supported AT&T's effort to develop a cable Internet marketplace that would close off competing services.
The irony of supporting monopoly in the interest of competition was not lost on the openNET Coalition, a consortium of ISPs that will effectively be excluded from cable broadband if AT&T's controlling position is upheld. "The FCC has been able to avoid regulation of the Net precisely because the underlying network is open and market forces can serve the interests of business, consumers, and the economy," observed Rich Bond, co-director of the openNET Coalition. "We believe AT&T's plan for a closed noncompetitive system will create exactly the kind of 'bottleneck' that the FCC has tried to avoid."
AT&T has spent billions of dollars to acquire cable networks, and it will invest billions more to upgrade them to two-way, digital broadband status. Its efforts to keep these networks closed are understandable; that is how it expects to make money. And it is not unreasonable of Kennard to assume that the quickest way to ensure the full development of broadband networks is to grant favored status to a corporate giant such as AT&T. But to mistake such corporate protection for sound public policy is another matter entirely, and the public-interest advocacy community has led a chorus of dissent in response to the FCC chairman's position. "We're at a fork in the information superhighway," observed Andrew Schwartzman, president and CEO of the Media Access Project. "One way leads to open access, boundless innovation and free expression. The other has us follow the same path that made cable TV the closed, unresponsive and overpriced monopoly Americans have grown to hate."
Fast Access to What?
O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?
Do you say Venture not--if you leave me you are lost?--Song of the Open Road
Even as AT&T and its lawyers and lobbyists battle AOL and its lawyers and lobbyists in the high-stakes broadband sweepstakes, the real issue at hand--more philosophical than financial--tends to be overlooked. This is a battle over the basic character of the online world. As the Media Access Project observed in its petition to the FCC in favor of open broadband access, "Offering Internet access under the close cable-TV system model will, quite literally, change the character of the Internet as an engine of creative technological and marketplace innovation, open entry, economic growth, and free expression."
Under the cable model, content owned by the cable companies and their partners will receive top priority, delivered to our homes at what will become the standard for high-speed access, while other programming will receive less favorable handling. The industry has already started to develop the capacity to deliver these differentiated services. Cable companies are building local, high-speed storage facilities across the nation to provide quick and convenient access to their own entertainment and information products. And as Cisco Systems (one of the leaders in providing sophisticated networking hardware and software to cable ISPs) boasts to its customers, the new networking technology gives "you the information you need to offer advanced differentiated services at a profit... . [Y]ou can optimize service profits by marketing 'express' services to premium customers ready to pay for superior network performance."
Under such a system, the Internet will become much more of a "branded" environment, with premium service for certain products and certain customers, leaving others with second- and third-class transport (or possibly no carriage at all, for those who cannot afford even the lowest tier of sliding-scale fees). If a nonprofit or small commercial content provider wanted to have its information included, for example, it would be forced to seek approval and pay fees to the cable companies. The same constraints that currently affect other delivery systems, in other words, most notably the film, broadcast, publishing, and recording industries, would now effectively limit the Internet, creating distribution bottlenecks in a system through which all manner of material once flowed freely.
Even without all of the monitoring, metering, and merchandising that will likely characterize the cable industry's handling of Internet access, a more fundamental question remains unanswered: Access to what? The likelihood that entertainment and telecommunications conglomerates will dominate broadband underscores theneed to foster noncommercial civic, educational, and cultural values in the new medium. This is the other, often overlooked side of the online world, beyond the booming e-commerce marketplace, and all but ignored in the attention lavished by the media on soaring Internet stocks. As William J. Mitchell, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, observes in his book City of Bits, "The most crucial task before us is not one of putting in place the digital plumbing of broadband communications links and associated electronic appliances (which we will certainly get anyway), nor even of producing electronically deliverable 'content,' but rather one of imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communications that we will want to have."
Part of that "imagination and creation" process, clearly, is a frank assessment of what is missing in the existing online environment, starting with those communications services and information resources that our democracy will need inthe twenty-first century. A number of worthy civic and cultural Web sites already exist, many of them the work of nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. But most of these are scattered across an online universe that is increasingly dominated by such companies as AOL and Yahoo.
Any assessment of the online environment also has to consider the "digital divide," the gap that separates people with and without access to computers and online networks. Approximately half of all households now own computers, but the percentage of white children with computers at home is triple that of black and Hispanic children. While half of families with annual incomes over $75,000 have Internet access, only 10 percent of the rural poor do. Recent evidence suggests, moreover, that despite encouraging increases in computer access among minorities and the poor, the gap may actually be widening.
Priced beyond the reach of many households, broadband services will probably exacerbate inequalities in access. Cable has never been held to a standard of universal service. In a cable-driven communication medium, universal service will give way to preferential service, in which "preference" is defined both by the network operator's power to establish new classes of service and by the consumer's ability to pay.
But it is not too late to begin imagining a different online world. It would be a world that would at least maintain--better yet, enrich--the very things we value in the real world, everything from educational opportunities and social services to community organizations and cultural expression. E-commerce almost certainly will take off, but we are going to need a concerted, societal effort to ensure that nonprofit activities flourish as well.
Finding new ways to meet these needs in the digital age should be a primary concern in thinking about the new broadband systems. Unfortunately, as new technology has advanced, we've grown accustomed to sitting back and awaiting the next scientific breakthrough to deliver yet another product that is smaller, faster, cheaper, and more powerful than its predecessor. If we expect to get the full social benefits of the new networks, however, we will need a far more active, participatory approach. Now the most critical step is to ensure that Internet access remains open and nondiscriminatory--that no single corporate giant gains control of it. We still have time to put the Internet of the future back on the open road.
By: Jeff Chester and Gary O. Larson
The Chronicle of Philanthropy
May 2000
Summary Foundations and nonprofit organizations alike need to participate in the public-policy debates surrounding the deployment of the new broadband networks. Only in this manner can we ensure a high-speed Internet that will retain the openness and diversity that have been so important to the work of nonprofit organizations operating in the traditional, dial-up environment.
Non-profit organizations, like almost all other segments of American society, are understandably excited about the opportunities that online communications afford. Indeed, the Internet is already transforming all aspects of charitable practice, from enlisting volunteers to forming new partnerships between non-profit and for-profit organizations.
Yet for all the good news associated with the Internet, troubling questions remain. While many charities and foundations have begun to focus on the "digital divide" — the lack of computer access and content for the poor and for minority groups — very few have paid attention to an issue with equally significant consequences.
A battle is now being fought over the future of "broadband" — the high-speed cable and phone-line connections that will soon become the standard means by which most Americans reach the Internet. The broadband revolution, now in its infancy, represents one of those "communications crossroads" that we reach periodically, not unlike the advent of telephony, radio, television, cable, and the Internet itself.
More often than not, the non-profit world and the public-interest values it embodies have lagged in the deployment of new communications systems, as commercial interests led the way.
No doubt that will be our experience with broadband too, with various new forms of e-commerce and interactive television defining the new communications system. But with a little organized effort by foundations and other non-profit organizations, there is still time to make certain that the public interest is accommodated in the new broadband networks.
Without question, those new networks have the potential to create a much more diverse, democratic media system, fostering the kind of "electronic civic sector" that has proved so elusive in an increasingly market-driven system. But for all of the promise of broadband networks to serve our democracy, they come with absolutely no guarantees. In the absence of the necessary public policies to ensure open network access and to foster noncommercial content, the broadband platform will simply become another extension of the existing mass media, designed primarily to sell rather than to serve.
Enjoying an 80-percent share of the existing broadband market, and with access to two-thirds of the nation's households, cable appears likely to dominate high-speed Internet service over the next several years. The danger that cable's reign poses to the diversity and democracy of the Internet is quite simple: Unlike their telephone-company counterparts, cable operators are not required to share their networks with competitive Internet service providers.
It would not be surprising, then, if cable operators decide to exclude the vast majority of the nation's 6,000-plus Internet service providers from their new high-speed networks. Consumer choice will be limited accordingly, and, equally important, the many community networks and other organizations that provide a vital public service will be hard pressed to survive.
In addition, the underlying architecture of the new networks will make possible tiered levels of service, priced accordingly. Informational and editorial content owned by or affiliated with the cable operator is likely to receive preferential treatment, while other material is relegated to the slower lanes. Non-profit and community-based organizations will be especially challenged, as businesses and other organizations that can afford to pay for premium service will thrive.
The same constraints that now affect other mass-media-delivery systems, including film, broadcast, and publishing, will now effectively limit the Internet, creating distribution bottlenecks in a system in which all manner of material once flowed freely.
And it's not just the senders of the information who will have to pay. Americans will probably face higher charges (or endure longer waits) to gain access to information that isn't distributed by groups affiliated with cable companies. All users, to greater or lesser degrees, will suffer in this situation, as vital news and information will be reduced to commodity status in a vast data marketplace.
Fortunately, there is still time to influence the broadband revolution, but foundations and other non-profit groups must move now to make their views known. Among the steps that non-profit organizations can take:
First, the Federal Communications Commission must be prevailed upon to consider making a formal ruling on the broadband-access issue. That will give all parties in the debate an opportunity to clarify their goals and strategies for the broadband era, wresting the future of the medium from the realm of press releases and placing it squarely in the arena of public policy, where it belongs.
Non-profit organizations need to weigh in on this issue, and to insist that the "public interest, convenience, and necessity," long the forgotten standard governing the electronic media, be much more vigorously applied to the broadband context.
Second, non-profit organizations should make their presence felt as hundreds of local franchise authorities review cable-system transfers and renewals in the coming months. A handful of municipalities have already succeeded in establishing open-access requirements, while other communities have won important concessions in support of noncommercial facilities and programming. Non-profit groups must demonstrate the role that local high-speed networks can play in their work, and build such systems into local franchise agreements.
Indeed, given the rapid commercialization of the World Wide Web, and the impending convergence of broadcast and online technologies, it is all the more important that non-profit groups act now to foster an environment in which all forms of civic, educational, and cultural expression can flourish.
Foundations can play a role in this regard, too, by undertaking projects that educate the public about the nature of the emerging broadband landscape; by supporting civic, educational, and cultural uses of the new media; and by monitoring the installation of broadband networks in their own communities to ensure that the public interest is represented.
With the requisite public-interest ground rules in place, the new broadband networks could bring a vast array of new programming into the home, at once extending the reach of the Internet (which currently serves only a third of the nation's households) and enhancing its content (much of which is currently constrained by the bandwidth limitations of dial-up modems). In the process, foundations and their grantees, no longer solely at the mercy of the mass media for coverage, will have an important new platform of their own from which to express views, exchange ideas, publicize their work, and continue to do what they do best--touching the lives of millions.
By: Jeff Chester
Philadelphia Inquirer
May 2000
Summary The power of new-media giants such as AOL Time Warner demands new public policies to ensure that at least a small portion of the emerging broadband environment will be devoted to noncommercial, public-interest programming.
The recently betrothed AOL and Time Warner should be hearing wedding bells any day now, their union blessed by Washington regulators seemingly enthralled by the fast play of market forces.
Look at the papers the beloveds filed recently with the FCC as part of the proposed merger, the largest in U.S. corporate history. See all the appendixes - bullish reports on the merged company's prospects from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Paine Webber. The Merrill Lynch analysts predict that the final impact of the merger would be profound, suggesting that AOL-TW would likely become the "operating system for everyday life." Everywhere, there's an enthusiastic embrace of an interactive future filled with "sticky" content, instant messaging, buddy lists and "dynamic" brand-distribution platforms. But is that all we should expect of the broadband revolution? An enhanced online marketplace?
If we want more - and we should, including more community access, more room for public, not just commercial, uses - we need to start our public debate now, because it's getting late.
Still in its infancy, broadband delivery is a communications crossroads not unlike the advent of telephony, radio, television, cable and the Internet. The impact of this latest communications revolution eventually will touch all aspects of our lives.
Whether all that is ultimately good or bad, however, remains to be determined. The opportunity is before us, now that bandwidth constraints have been lifted and the new digital infrastructure is about to be put in place, to build a richer set of services that promote citizenship and democracy, education and culture. All of these are aspects of community - both virtual and real - that are beyond the power of the increasingly commercialized marketplace to deliver on its own.
But they are within our grasp, if we make the right decisions now about how the broadband future should unfold.
As Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dean of Architecture William J. Mitchell observes in his book City of Bits, "The most crucial task before us is not one of putting in place the digital plumbing of broadband communications links and associated electronic appliances (which we will certainly get anyway), nor even of producing electronically deliverable 'content,' but rather one of imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communications that we will want to have."
The process that Mitchell describes, one of establishing a vision for the broadband future, requires that we develop an agenda now for building an online environment that serves the public interest as effectively as it meets the expectations of Wall Street. Waiting until after the e-commerce marketplace matures before adopting public-service requirements will yield only a repeat of the sad story of broadcast television, where advocates of free time for political discourse, for example, are reduced to begging stations for a modest five minutes of airtime for debates.
As a first step in developing a new public-interest agenda, we need look no further than such communities as Portland, Ore., and Montgomery County, Md., where local officials have negotiated franchise agreements with broadband network providers that contain important public-interest concessions. These include setting aside portions of the bandwidth for noncommercial use, securing new support for community applications, and installing high-speed connections for civic organizations.
At the national level, just as we have carved out space for noncommercial programming on radio and television (and, more recently, on direct broadcast satellite systems), so should we set a portion of the broadband environment aside for similar noncommercial fare (and, more important, for new interactive public-interest services). As our experience with public broadcasting has shown, however, bandwidth set-asides alone will not be enough to achieve broadband's full programming potential. We have to find ways to sustain the kinds of civic, educational and cultural services that will otherwise be lacking if broadband is merely commercialized.
Companies such as AOL-TW, which control both conduit and content, also need to be held to a higher public standard. They will wield tremendous power in the marketplace of ideas, which is why an open-access policy to ensure that the Internet remains democratic and diverse is also needed. It is time for a national dialogue with policymakers, these new media leaders, and the public to ensure that the new broadband Internet serves as effectively as it sells.
By: Jeff Chester
The Nation
October 2000
Summary : The emergence of the broadband Internet, driven largely by the cable conglomerates that will dominate high-speed Internet service to the home, poses a major threat to the future openness and diversity of the Internet. Unless the necessary "open-access" regulations are enacted, today's democratic, competitive Internet will be replaced by a thoroughly commercialized delivery system featuring "walled gardens" of proprietary, "branded" content.
By any standard, the proposed merger of America Online and Time Warner, currently under review in Washington, is enormous. Even in this era of mega-mergers, the marriage of the world's largest Internet service provider (ISP) and the largest media conglomerate (which directly controls almost one-fifth of the nation's cable subscribers and which, through a relationship with AT&T, has a stake in another 30 percent) stands out above the rest. What we don't see, however--or rather won't see, so extensive is the web of mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and "co-branded properties" that ensnares the mass media today--may be the biggest story of all: the transformation of the Internet into a collection of commercially driven "walled gardens."
Given cable's clout (roughly two-thirds of all households currently subscribe), the broadband networks that AOL-TW, AT&T and other cable operators are in the process of introducing will very likely become the Internet delivery platform of choice for most Americans in the years to come. Wireless and satellite broadband transmissions are still two to three years off, and even if the phone companies' new digital subscriber line (DSL) connections manage to maintain their small broadband market share (roughly 20 percent), cable's fatter pipes will allow it to win the race to deliver the rich-media content of the next-generation Internet.
While the basic structure of the Internet itself won't change--it will range as far and wide as ever--the means through which subscribers gain access to its varied resources, using systems modeled on cable's closed video platform, will gradually constrict. New forms of interactive television, offering what amounts to "Internet Lite" via proprietary set-top boxes, will substitute ease of use for freedom of choice, featuring what AOL-TW euphemistically refers to as "next-generation branded content." Over time, as cable broadband takes hold, the Internet for most Americans will evolve into what media historian Ben Bagdikian predicts will be "the biggest shopping mall in the world."
Before he bought his way into the cable market, AOL's Steve Case was a leading figure in the movement to break the cable industry's stranglehold on the growing broadband market. But on the day AOL became an owner of cable with the announcement of its merger with Time Warner, that changed. In the words of TW's Gerald Levin, "We're going to take the open access issue out of Washington and out of City Hall and put it into the marketplace." In other words, AOL-TW, AT&T and other cable giants will remain the Internet's ultimate gatekeepers. In the absence of new regulatory safeguards, there's nothing to prevent cable operators from narrowly defining the Internet experience for their subscribers in any number of ways. The cable ISP, for example, can determine both the "start page" at which the user's online travels begin and the onscreen "real estate" and navigational menus, in which the user makes programming choices. It will even be possible for network operators to manage online traffic to expedite the delivery of affiliated content while relegating competitive material to second-class service.
Unfortunately, the FCC under chairman William Kennard has thus far taken a hands-off position. FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky appears to be much more keenly aware of what's at stake. In the next few weeks, the FTC and the FCC will decide what kinds of conditions, if any, need to be imposed on the merger. Although formally opposed to the AOL-TW alliance, a coalition of consumer and public interest groups has asked that--if it is to be approved--there be at least two basic safeguards. One would require AOL-TW to agree to a policy of open access and nondiscriminatory transport, insuring that competitive ISPs and websites would have a legal right to use the company's broadband pipes--including the set-top boxes that will become the crucial link between cable's past and interactive television's future. The other would cut the ownership ties between AOL-TW and AT&T. Without new cross-ownership restrictions, these two affiliated companies would have a chokehold on high-speed Internet content and distribution.
Open access to the broadband Internet is essential if we are to insure that a diverse range of voices has a chance of reaching out to citizens in the new era of high-speed communications. And once such access is secured, public-interest, nonprofit and other alternative voices must be prepared to offer interactive programming that will make a difference. For in the new world being created by AOL-TW and others, that kind of programming, free of brand identification, product tie-ins and other e-commerce opportunities, simply won't be on the agenda.