Timothy Karr: 4 ways 2014 was big for the Internet

The death of the Internet is at hand.Sound familiar? That’s what Internet pioneer Robert Metcalfe predicted in 1995, when he wrote that spiraling demands on the fledgling network would cause the Internet to “catastrophically collapse” by 1996.

Metcalfe, of course, was dead wrong: The Internet is still chugging along, with a predicted 3 billion users by year’s end.

Still, the Internet’s fate feels distinctly uncertain as 2014 draws to a close. At stake is whether the Internet remains a democratic, user-powered network — or falls under the control of a few powerful entities.

Here are the four Internet issues that played leading roles this year:

1. Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is hard-wired into the Internet as we know it. In a neutral network, users control their experience without their Internet service providers interfering, filtering, or censoring. This revolutionary principle is under attack from the phone and cable companies that control access in the United States.

In a court decision last January, Verizon successfully challenged the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to protect Net Neutrality, setting in motion a year-long effort to restore the agency’s authority. More than 4 million Americans, including President Barack Obama, have contacted the FCC, with the overwhelming majority demanding real Net Neutrality protections.

Watch for a decision on the matter as early as January 2015. Momentum is now swinging in favor of keeping the Internet open — thanks in large part to the forceful public response.

2. Consolidation

The Internet is designed to function as a decentralized network — meaning that control over information doesn’t fall into the hands of a few gatekeepers, but instead rests with everyone who goes online.

This has enabled diverse voices to flourish. It’s amplified the concerns of protesters from Ferguson to Hong Kong, given underrepresented communities a platform, and allowed startup businesses to reach millions of new customers.

What’s missing is choice among Internet-access providers: Too many communities can choose from only one or two. We need policies that will foster competition, which in turn would lower costs, improve services, and ensure that no single company gains too much control over content.

This year, Comcast and AT&T are attempting to consolidate their control over all-things-Internet. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, wants to gobble up the second largest, Time Warner Cable. If regulators approve the Comcast merger, the company would become the only traditional cable provider available to nearly two-thirds of Americans.

Meanwhile, AT&T wants to take over DIRECTV.

It’s up to the FCC and the Justice Department to block these mergers, which would create colossal, monopoly-minded behemoths. The government’s blessing of these deals would teleport us back to a time when just a few media moguls controlled most public discourse.

3. Online Privacy

In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed mass spying programs that violate our civil liberties. This wholesale invasion of privacy has chilled free expression online.

There were signs of hope that 2014 would bring new legislation to rein in these government snooping powers. The USA Freedom Act, while imperfect, would have curtailed the NSA’s bulk collection of our phone records and required more oversight and transparency of its surveillance programs.

The Senate, however, voted not to consider the bill in November, leaving everyone at the mercy of an agency with a voracious appetite for data.

4. Community Networks

With big Internet providers like Comcast gaining notoriety for dismal customer service, municipal broadband networks have gained traction everywhere from New York City to Monmouth, Oregon.

It’s easy to see why: The big providers often refuse to build networks in low-income or rural communities where potential customers can’t afford to pay their sky-high rates.

The rise of homegrown Internet infrastructure has prompted industry lobbyists to introduce state-level legislation to smother such efforts. There are at least 20 such statutes on the books. But in June, the FCC stepped in with a plan to preempt these state laws, giving communities the support they need to affordably connect more people.

If you value free speech, keep an eye on these four issues as 2015 gets underway. To ensure an Internet that’s open, fast, secure, and affordable, contact the FCC, call your members of Congress, and support efforts to build a network that works for everyone.

Timothy Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press (FreePress.net). This piece is distributed by OtherWords.org. 

Ukraine and the Sudetenland

March 2, 2014

Gray but at least not very cold morning.  A little bit of drizzle. A couple of layers of rock salt and sand on the roads. Some of the ground around the trees unfrozen. Stored-up heat from yesterday's sunlight?

Lots of potholes on the roads. Will Providence's mayor, Angel Taveras, fill enough of them fast enough  to avoid lethally damaging his run for governor? How many broken axles can he take?

Happy to hear that we won't get the snowstorm that had been promised for tonight and tomorrow. But heard little birdsong this morning. No bright sun to get the feathered bastards excited.

In some years, plenty of crocuses out by now in sunny spots.  But on this year's tundra, we will have to wait,  I would guess, until the end of next week. Perhaps the big rainstorm that some meteos see coming up the coast at the of end of this week will unfreeze the ground enough to speed things along.

Meanwhile, about five more degrees this morning and the worms will be wiggling in the compost bin.

Russian dictator and former KGB official Vlad Putin is doing to Ukraine what Hitler did to Czechoslovakia: Using the excuse of "rescuing''  his "compatriots'' (if that's what Russian-speaking Ukrainians are)  to try to bring a whole democratic country to heel.

In Hitler's case, he used the  bogus "plight'' of ethnic/linguistic Germans living in the Sudetenland strip of democratic Czechoslovakia as an excuse to take over that country after it was betrayed by France and Britain as then-isolationist America looked on.

Now we have further proof that Putin's occasionally murderous regime is also an imperialist and fascist one. We had plenty of proof already.

Will the European Union do anything? Has the Europeans' relentless  military disarmament emboldened the Russian dictator to follow Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin and create a new empire, or rather reconstitute the Soviet one in the form of a fascist and xenophobic one?

As when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 (when Republican Eisenhower was U.S. president) and Czechoslovakia in 1968 (when Democrat and Vietnam-distracted Lyndon Johnson was president) to impose its will, so apparently it is doing now in Ukraine.

Of course, whatever the rhetoric, the West can do little in the short term to stop the Russians, though it would be nice to think that we could ship the Ukrainians some arms. But then, other than risk World War III, we could do little immediately in '56 and '68, despite the demands of conservative Republicans that we "roll back the Iron Curtain.''

But the Russian economy, whose only really successful part is oil and gas exports, is very vulnerable to long-term economic sanctions -- if the Europeans can summon up more courage and persistence that they have shown lately.

The first thing  powerful thing we can do is to start freezing Russian assets in the U.S. (much of them produced from criminal activities anyway) and revoke the visas of Russian officials and businesspersons. Hit the Putin regime very hard in the pocketbook.

And let's hope that we not only take strong measures to thwart cyber-attacks on the Ukrainians, the Western Europeans and us during Russia's invasion of Ukraine but also go on the offensive to do everything possible to make Putin's invasion painful to his regime, which presides over what is in many ways a very fragile, if geographically vast, nation.

Of course, with Putin pal and Moscow resident Edward Snowden probably continuing to feed U.S. systems information to the Kremlin that will be more difficult than it would have been a couple of years ago. (Why oh why has Snowden, who took his information first to the Chinese communist dictatorship and then to the fascist one in the Kremlin been presented as some sort of a hero? )

But America, as an innovative and open society, has far more creativity than does the profoundly corrupt and paranoid Russia ruled by Putin. In the end, we can outsmart it.

respond via rwhitcomb51@gmail.