Subtopic: General

Here’s the bottom line: if you want the future of digital community-building to look like the Internet, you want the future of telecommunications regulation to be organized on common-carrier principles. Do yourself a big favor this month: say the phrase “common carrier” over and over until you start to like the sound of it. Then get yourself going: agitate, educate, and organize. Without you it just won’t happen.

Somebody [must] throw some more light on the practices of the would-be monopolists, the companies whose business models are predicated on poorly regulated control of both carrier and content. This is not the free market in operation. Rather, it’s large-scale “issues management” aimed at institutionalizing a set of anti-competitive regulatory structures. Issues management is the high-powered synthesis of lobbying, legal advocacy, public relations, and the quasi-intellectual work of “think tanks” … The cause of democracy would be greatly enhanced world-wide if the practices of issue management were thoroughly exposed and if clear, powerful metaphors for the process became as widespread as Big Brother and the Panopticon.

The kind of future the NII helps shape depends, in part, on the visions it is intended to achieve and the strategies used to implement those goals. Industry spokespeople describe the NII as a vehicle for movies on demand, home shopping, and sit-com reruns, with the “serious” content provided by endless infomercials. Clinton Administration liberals stress the NII’s educational importance of allowing access to endless information, as well as its potential to spur private sector economic development. Many cybernauts are most enthused about the creation of virtual communities … To those of us who see the NII as a critical tool for the revitalization of democracy, the strengthening of neighborhoods, the release of grass-roots cultural creativity, and the revival of mutual aid, these visions are a painful warning of opportunities we hope are not yet lost.