Guest review by David Isenberg.
David spent 12 years at AT&T Bell Labs until his 1997 essay,"The Rise of the Stupid Network," was received with acclaim everywhere in the global telecommunications community with one exception -- at AT&T itself! So Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 to found isen.com, LLC (an independent telecom analysis firm based in Cos Cob, Connecticut) and to publish The SMART Letter, an open-minded commentary on the communications revolution and its enemies.
I watched The Net@Risk, by Bill Moyers and company, last night. I must admit at the very start that I am biased towards the show's message -- that the miracle that is the Internet is endangered by impending corporate government control, abetted by a captured Congress and a weak FCC. But at the outset, regardless of the show's viewpoint or mine, I observe that it is the only piece of in-depth reporting on telecom policy that I've seen on TV. That says a whole lot by itself!
The show focused on the Internet as a vehicle for Democracy -- the same meme that is the central focus of my last two Freedom to Connect conferences.
The first segment of the Moyers show was devoted to my friend Bruce Kushnick's work that shows how the telcos promised the fiber optic future in the 1990s, got tax breaks and rate relief, and then failed to deliver. Kushnick says we don't need to look further than this to understand why the US is behind the rest of the world.
There was a long segment devoted to the Lafayette Louisiana FTTH effort, showing why the city decided to do its own fiber network -- a) because some people still remember the Rural Electification Act, which is embodied in LUS, the local muni power company, and b) because BellSouth and Cox both said, "We'll get to Lafayette in a decade or two." The segment then detailed how BellSouth and Cox forced a vote, then ignored their overwhelming defeat at the polls, then sued and sued and sued. It depicted remarkable bipartisanship -- I don't know if the show went out of its way to find Republicans that supported the Lafayette FTTH plan, but there sure were a lot of them.
There was an extended sit-down interview between Moyers and Mark Cooper. I am amazed at Mark Cooper's talent for explaining basic concepts powerfully without dumbing them down. He spoke of the bias in the telegraph system -- how around 1900 the telegraph favored AP and discriminated against other news organizations, and extended it to railroads, innkeepers, etc., and then to the Internet to show how Common Carriage was a pillar of Capitalism. (The Supreme Court (1906) found that Western Union was barred from discriminating even in the absence of a statute, because non-discrimination was so deeply embedded in common law.)
There was another big segment on the disappearance of local radio as a result of relaxing ownership rules. It avoided didacticism by zeroing in on the role that a small LPFM station on the Gulf Coast played during and after the Katrina disaster. The fellow who built and ran the station lives on social security. His was one of four stations in the area that stayed on the air (out of 40-some, virtually all owned by out-of-town corporations) and the only radio station that had actual people in the region to tell people where to get food and water and ice. In Katrina, this fellow lost everything except the radio station, and miraculously, the antenna mast.
The show also featured brief clips of last week's FCC hearing in Los Angeles on media ownership. I happened to watch a lot of it on C-SPAN, and it, too, was edge-of-your-seat TV. Speaker after speaker spoke eloquently of the importance of local ownership as a channel for new creative talent, for business, for news, political expression. I watched the body language of the Commissioners. Copps and Adelstein were engaged. Deborah Taylor Tate, on the other hand, seemed to lean back as if to distance herself. McDowell, the new guy, was tabula rasa. Chairman Martin was leaning forward, as if he caught the passion, so it will be interesting to see whether any of what he heard will shape his policy-making. I do not think that Moyers devoted enough footage to this critical hearing, but in fairness, most of this show has been "in the can" for weeks, and he probably had some hard choices about what to cut to include any of it.
If the show had any "opportunities for improvement," they were in the depiction of the incumbent side. I have to say, though, that if I put on my most impartial hat, I can't see a lot of merit in most of the Bellheads' arguments. Mike McCurry was the main face of the opposition, and he's just a paid flack. I would have liked to have seen Ed Whitacre saying, "My pipes," and Ted Stevens saying, "Series of tubes." I would have liked to hear Andrew Odlyzko explaining how discrimination yields economic efficiency. I would have liked to hear some proponents of CALEA and 911-over-VOIP make their case. But then, this show was not for me, it was about taking the message to a larger audience. And I think it did a hell of a job.
If you missed it, the video is online at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/index.html. And there's an exchange between Mike McCurry and Ben Scott of Free Press here that's worth reading: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/citizensclass/2006/10/post.html The comments following this exchange show, if anything, that if you give people a voice, virtually all of them who are not employees of the incumbent industry are deeply concerned for the future of the Internet.
