There’s been a lot of press in the last year or so about port blocking, open access, Net Freedoms, and so on. I won’t provide the links, you go find ‘em. Every forum, mailing list, conference, and discussion panel seems to have a lot of heated opinion about it. Although I couldn’t attend the VON sessions, there was heated debate there between the “Freeloader!” and the “Freedom fighter!” factions.
But why should I, emotively, care at all?
Stop for a moment. Why do you, personally, care about this issue? Telecom isn’t the only industry with distribution bottlenecks, significant market power, and cross-subsidy between the stages of production. Just look at how baked beans are positioned in supermarket shelves. Manufacturers in the UK pay the supermarkets to buy prime positions. Yet telecom incites such great passion in intelligent people. Baked beans don’t. What’s going on?
I think I’ve finally worked out why. It’s David Isenberg’s elephant in the corner — what he ambiguously calls Freedom to Connect. Most of these arguments attempt to build a logical economic thesis about why we do or don’t have the correct balance between price discrimination, competition and common carriage. But it increasingly misses the point. We sense there’s a deeper, more troubling, aspect to getting cut off from part of the conversation.
Whilst nebulous and fluffy, it’s all about democracy. The rest is post hoc rationalization of our more fundamental beliefs about how a 21st century society needs to be wired up to work. And my thesis is that we are underestimating the importance of this political (as opposed to economic) side of the debate.
The sense of indignation you feel inside you when you hear about port blocking is because you sense the loss that those customer are enduring. You and I have come to realize that if you don’t have access, you aren’t able to fully participate in society any more in some non-trivial way. You can still do the old analogue things, have a protest at the street corner. But the crowds have moved online. Nobody can hear you.
Not only that, but when someone else gets the chop, you’ve lost a member of the demos from your democracy. Your conversation is impaired by others no longer being able to participate.
Why don’t we feel so upset about the closed, walled gardens of wireless networks? There are several reasons, I believe. Firstly, the very nature of the medium lends itself to competition (through multiple overlapping networks), which ensures some degree of openness. The low cost of wireless telephony is also in itself a great democratising force. Going from zero phones to one closed one is a great step forward. Participation is everything. We also have lower expectations based on the natural capacity limits the technology has had until recently. Our tolerance of “co-operative bottlenecks” has been greater in order to share the resource better.
On the other hand, when someone’s Net connections to their home come under pressure of restriction, we react differently. I think this is partly a psychological issue of how we view these spaces differently. We are defensive of our homes. Somewhat tenuously, the family still is the organising unit of society. We aspire for every household to have at least some form of unfettered access to all forms of information discourse. That’s why it hurts when we fall short.
Which brings me to my real point. This conversational chatty democracy stuff all sounds fine. But that’s hardly going to energize society into fits of fiber laying and open access regulation. Where’s the beef? Well, here’s my outrageous suggestion:
The ability to access Internet content and services is the new Right to Bear Arms.
Wow. I’ve said it. So what does it mean? The founders of the United States of America in their wisdom saw the seizure of excessive power by government as a central risk. To counteract this, they ensured the general populace would always be sufficiently armed. This gives any putative dictator or tyrant pause for thought before exercising the machinery of government violence for undemocratic ends. The price is a certain undercurrent of everyday violence, but the experiment has by and large succeeded. The USA is one of the longest-standing constitutional democracies, and has withstood extraordinary change in demographics and fortune during that period.
We’re moving from a society where physical force was the prime means of coercion to one where ideas have ascendancy. Physical force doesn’t scale well as a means of subjugation. It’s one thing to take a man’s posessions; quite another to persuade him to make your dinner every night for nothing. The hardest part of the civil rights movement wasn’t undoing the yoke of the white man, but persuading the everyday black man that it was his inalienable right to have that yoke removed. Once that was achieved, the outcome was largely a foregone conclusion.
Building tyranny is harder when the populace is armed with good information. It’s not impossible; indeed, a tyranny of the majority is still a major risk. But when I can have a cheap encrypted Skype conversation with Iranians, Syrians, and Mexicans, something qualitative has changed. For example, when I visited Syria a few years ago, we went to Hama. This town was largely razed in 1982 (with the loss of tens of thousands of lives) when its own army shelled the city to put down an Islamic uprising against the Baathist government. I pass no comment on the politics of it, but merely note that this is a little-known episode of history. You certainly don’t see it mentioned on the official tourist website. Can you imagine keeping such news under wraps in the era of video cameraphones, satellite Internet and Skype?
Consider a populace that wants to rise up against its political masters. We’re already at the point where the government response isn’t to take away the populace’s arms, but to take away its means of communication. Militias don’t congregate in the woods and more, they start their own Yahoo! group and MoveOn and Meetup from there.
There’s no point in demanding universal access if you don’t have the economic means to deliver. Much of the debate is about means, not ends. But those ends deserve greater exposure and reflection. If we are serious about transformation of society through information technology it means sweeping away many of the special protections the telecom industry has managed to accrue, enforcement of competition law, and greater collective effort to deploy connectivity and open up wireless and fixed rights of way.
There’s more at stake here than cheap phone calls and unlimited TV channels. Cheap airlines have done more for European cohesion and understanding than decades of political exhortation. Cheap, ubiquitous and unfiltered communications are becoming a prerequisite of a pluralist participative democracy. Societies that fail to encourage the free flow of information will suffer because ingrained interest groups will ensure the rules are set up to perpetuate their privileges. When you can’t make a Skype call, you’re losing something more than money.
You might believe that your political system is a stable one delivering endless contended freedom and openness. But your average American feels a lot more secure in that knowledge with a rifle in the basement. I’d want the same feeling of security, just with symmetric gigabit fibre so I can host my own subversive content if necessary.
Next time someone is vigorously defending the existence of filters on the Net, dig deeper. Don’t ask them for the logic of their argument. Rather, try to find out why it excites them so much. Perhaps they aren’t aware of what animates their own passions.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 08:56 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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"Freedom to Connect" As Today's "Right to Bear Arms" from IP Democracy
At Telepocalypse, Martin Geddes makes what he calls an “outrageous suggestion” that “[t]he ability to access Internet content and services is the new Right to Bear Arms.” There’s been a lot of press in the last year or so abou...
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If you can't join 'em, beat 'em... from Isabel Walcott
Bruce sent along an outrageous article that was in the WSJ last week, regarding a problem that has been going on for at least a year (that's right, you heard it here first!) Did you know that your telecommunications provider
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Funny, I was speaking in a meeting about the fact that people are disenfranchised by lack of internet access and how the role of Corporate Governance is beginning to exert as much influence as government regulation (tenuous link, bear with me).
The internet has become essential to the ability to communicate information effectively and attempts to control and monitor it's use are like attempting to ban the wearing of tartan, or to eavesdrop every conversation we have from supermarket to pub to the front rooms of our houses.
Community will exert it's own control, whether that is through the current socio-political arrangement or some other grouping (e.g. shareholders).
Obviously, I just proved your point! ;)
When books were hand written very few could have access to them and to culture.
Most of the population didn't know how to read and write.
With the invention of the printing machines a big step was done towards literacy and culture, because books were more affordable, and many more had the "Freedom" to know.
Having cheaper, affordable and accessable ways to communications can make the world smaller and a beeter place to live in.
A major deterrent to war is communications. It is vital that people be able to communicate with each other quickly, effectively, and frequently.
Greater communications capabilities tend to lead to greater exchanges of information, values, cultural activities, and economic opportunities.
Where communications facilities are most extensive, wars are least frequent.
It is precisely the communications links which authoritarian governments try to limit and sever whenever they seek to perpetrate massive acts of oppression.
And this is the political point of view.
But filtering, building barriers is also a "self defence".
Your freedom ends where mine begins.
And nobody can deny the fact that I have the freedom to cut out of my space, of my line, of my computer, what I do not like.
In that the gun can be the virtual filter.
But "Freedom to connect" is the right to have an affordable connection to the world outside.
Globalisation is a need not an option anymore.
And if we want to build a better world, a peaceful place to live, we HAVE to provide affordable communications.
Patrizia
http://woip.blogspot.com
Some nice thinking there - I love the statement "Cheap airlines have done more for European cohesion and understanding than decades of political exhortation" and could not agree more. Surely as Martin points out this should be born in mind for telecoms, since the former is about atom movement, and the latter bit movement. If you plumbed a country with FTTH with no eaves dropping certainly I think the result would be amazing in terms of economic growth Etc. BUT would you then end up with anarchy, lynch mobs, and super terrorists?
Posted by: at October 15, 2005 12:11 PM