Cable TV and The Future of Broadband

The Set-Top Set-Up:
How the Cable Giants Plan to Steal the Internet

In the course of announcing his company's merger with Time Warner last January, AOL's Steve Case proclaimed the dawn of the Internet Century. And now, less than a year later, that promising era of high-speed online communications is about to give way to a pale facsimile--call it the "Set-Top Century"--in which a handful of cable system magnates will be allowed to define the online experience for millions of American households. In what amounts to a bait-and-switch operation of colossal proportions, the cable industry is poised to offer (with the impending blessings of federal regulators, it appears), a streamlined subset of the Internet, with absolutely no guarantee that its tradition of competition and openness will be preserved. We will be asked to trade the depth and diversity of the Internet, in short, for the speed and simplicity of new interactive television (ITV) implementations, and that's a deal that none of us should be forced to make.

If there's a silver lining to this dark cloud of ever-growing media concentration, it's that the technology itself remains a tremendously powerful tool. And even as millions of broadband cable subscribers are led down the walled-garden path of the new Internet Lite, the old Internet that has nourished more than 7,000 Internet service providers (ISPs) and generated some 2 billion web pages will endure. It may be harder to reach, and many of its sites will be overshadowed by the media conglomerates' online estates, but it will persist nevertheless. Thus it becomes our job--those of us committed to a diverse, democratic online media system--to continue the campaign for open, nondiscriminatory access to all broadband networks--cable and telephone, wired and wireless. In the process, we'll make sure that the Internet, "… the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed," in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, will continue to serve the public interest.

We made great strides in bringing the open-access issue to the forefront during the debates that surrounded the AOL-Time Warner merger. The principle of open access, at least, has been widely acknowledged. We need only to ensure now that it is administered in a meaningful fashion--not in back-room agreements among the fortunate few, but in the form of open interconnection and nondiscriminatory transport for all ISPs and content providers. And it must apply to all forms of Internet traffic, whether through PC modems, set-top boxes, or devices still to be invented.

David Isenberg, the former Bell Labs researcher who was present at the creation of the Internet, often refers to it as the ultimate "stupid" network, in that all of the intelligence and power reside at the end points, rather than in the middle. In this manner network users, rather than owners and operators, are able to decide what services they need and what content they want. Today, in contrast, cable giants like AT&T and AOL-TW are introducing broadband networks encumbered with "artificial intelligence"--namely, the power to discriminate between affiliated and competitive programming, to trap users in branded environments that offer only the illusion of choice, and to maximize profits through tiered levels of service. Rather than the open-ended network that has so effectively fostered competition, innovation, and diversity, many Americans will be treated instead to a proprietary, closed system, one that reduces Internet traffic to the same commodity status that prevented cable television from ever realizing its full potential.

Ironically, now that bandwidth constraints have been lifted, facilitating the online exchange of a wide variety of multimedia content, artificial constraints imposed by network operators raise the specter of new bottlenecks. Those organizations lacking sufficient commercial clout--and the noncommercial, public-interest sector in particular--will be especially affected by the new broadband environment, which is why an organized movement is needed now to maintain the openness and diversity of the Internet. At the same time that we are concerned with these architectural issues of control and closed access as the chief threats to the Internet, we are equally committed to formulating a vision for what the Internet can become in the broadband era. Making room for effective commercial competition is one key goal. Another is helping to foster the dot-commons, the electronic civic sector that is unlikely to be created--or to be sustained if it is established--through the play of market forces alone. We must ensure, in other words, that our travels through cyberspace remain unfettered, that they do not, in fact, become mere guided tours of cable operators' online holdings.