Who Should Control The Internet?

In March of 2006, I predicted it was only a matter of time before “Alan Greenspan bemoans how greed trumped fiduciary—there’s a challenge, the word to follow: altruism, morality, prudence, foresight, responsibility?—common sense amid the frenzied credit-swapping enabled by deregulation the likes of which the country hasn’t seen in a century, to the current loss of faith in free markets in general. The free market of ideas is no exception, and indeed the challenge to it seems the norm.

The principle problem is people, their the lizard part (survival-centered part) of the brain telling them to be selfish, cruel, and near-sighted. Worse, when online, the brain’s higher-evolved empathy center (orbitofrontal cortex) is replaced by lizardly fear.)

In short, if one has a mustard-seed’s worth of faith in humans to self-regulate, one is likely overstocked. Even as hope prevails in uncertain times, there is always mixed signals from Congress and support from the upcoming administration, pushing through free national wireless broadband on spectrum set aside for that purpose with the vague caveat that the network filters out pornography/obscene content. The desired end is a good one; more people have access regardless of socioeconomic factors and geography and no one is exposed to smut on the government’s watch.

The proposal carries with it the usual content regulation pitfall, which is to leave it up to the FCC to decide that which is too indecent for the public at large, a role the current, more puritanical FCC has filled poorly, to the point that it is in danger of losing authority over content coming across one-way communication systems (television and radio). Constitutionally, the proposal is shaky because it involves government regulation of speech/expression.

The constitutional workaround might be to contract out the operation of the free network to a company chomping at the bit to provide it, M2Z, in which case the role of the FCC is similar to the role it plays with broadcasters, indirect monitoring of speech/expression regulation when over public airwaves. But the end effect is precarious because it sets a precedent for an internet service provider to block undesirable content from end users, which is the main tenet against which Net Neutrality supporters push. If M2Z is allowed to discriminate based on content, what defense would the public have against AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast doing the same?

The Parents Television Council, the chief content gadfly directing the decency course of the current FCC chairman in regard to fleeting expletives on broadcast and efforts to regulate even cable content, has turned its attention to YouTube. In addition to video content, the PTC is concerned about material appearing in the comments below a video. The organization, which pressures the FCC, networks, and advertisers to rid the world of all smut, conducted its own breast-feeding images are a violation of its terms of service, Kentucky is seizing gambling domains, and panels of humans decide what is and what isn’t harassment or detrimental bullying.  

The forecast for Net Neutrality, then, looks somewhat bleak. If the actual First Amendment is ignored in the form of content regulation, then the proposed and controversial First Amendment of the Internet seems doomed under the weight of overlapping government, organizational, and corporate agendas. Corporations either abuse or capitulate, organizations suffer from myopia and runaway zeal, and government tends to overcorrect for everything.

It seems inevitable, though, that this vastly imperfect and drawback-compounding troika will run the Internet future, much like in the history of other media. And there’s the rub: the chaos of free media is accepted as the powerful boon to overall freedom, warts and all, or usurpers reign in that power for themselves and true freedom (and knowledge) is either obliterated or shelved for the elite. 

What you have instead is not the myriad multitudes of individual problems and abuses present within single humans, but the compounded and potentially devastating problems and abuses of