Who controls the Internet?: Profit vs. privacy and free expression

Soldiers keep in touch with families through blogs (Web logs). Independent media and innumerable grass-roots campaigns flourish online. Social networking Web sites are a runaway phenomenon. “Googling” is a new verb for seeking information. These and other uses of the vast computer network have inspired many people to consider it a bastion of free speech.
But who controls the Net? Many believe that no one does and consider it to be a public resource. But while 1.26 billion people are hooked in to the Internet (almost a fifth of the world population), they do not own it. And the corporations that do, increasingly direct how the rest of us use it.
Origin of the Net. The Internet is a vast global collection of interconnected computer networks and the physical infrastructure and software standards that allow computers to communicate. It was developed with public funding in the 1960s and ’70s by the U.S. military and university computer researchers.
While the term “Internet” refers to the Network itself, the World Wide Web (WWW) is a system of interlinked documents accessible through the Net. The Web was developed in 1990 by the publicly funded European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. CERN made Web use free, open and non-proprietary.
Though the Internet and Web were developed and are still partly funded with public money, they have been turned over to profit-making corporations. Starting in 1988 under the Reagan administration, the National Science Foundation sponsored a series of conferences on “commercialization and privatization of the Internet.” This process was completed in 1995 with the defunding of the Internet’s backbone network.
Who owns cyberspace? The high-speed cables, wireless technology and computer routers are now owned primarily by telecommunications and cable companies such as Verizon, ATT, Qwest, and Sprint Nextel. Users buy access from commercial Internet Service Providers, such as Earthlink.
The content of the Web also comes under control via the scores of major sites owned by Google, Yahoo, InterActiveCorp (IAC), America On Line, and Microsoft. These giants harness the Net for profit by selling advertising. They use their enormous power to monopolize the Web. Businesses want to delete content that radicalizes and informs, and push even more emphasis on commercial products.
The vital issue of Network neutrality. Net neutrality is the principle that all content on the Internet should be accessible to all users. It is closely tied to maintaining free speech online.
The system was initially set up with equal access, but communications moguls now want to introduce charges for Web site delivery. To get faster “lanes,” companies would have to pay premium rates. Non-profit and small business sites that can’t afford to pay would be slowed or blocked.
Grassroots activists are pushing for Net neutrality legislation in Congress through such means as a petition that is available to sign at SavetheInternet.com. But the public should beware of a deceptive, telecommunications-backed “Hands Off the Internet” campaign that is actually fighting neutrality regulations.
Web suppression. Corporate media would have us believe that censorship only exists in China, the Middle East, and openly repressive regimes. But the technology to screen access to information originates with U.S. companies and is being used in the U.S., Europe and Australia.
A high profile case occurred last August, when ATT blipped anti-war lyrics in a Pearl Jam online concert. ATT has admitted censoring many bands.
The specter of terrorism is also used to justify clamping down on uninhibited expression. Internet services, email providers and search engines such as Google and Yahoo admit they readily comply with governmental gag-rules.
In 2005, the Web site of the Anti-Imperialist Camp, an Italian radical organization that defends the right of Iraqis to resist the U.S. occupation, was shut down by its Internet hosting company based in Utah. The Department of Homeland Security had had a secret court order in place for over a year requiring the Web host to turn over records of every visitor to the Anti-Imperialist Camp’s Web site. No one knows how many other sites are being monitored or blocked.
The dangerous new “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” (see cover story) focuses in part on the Internet. The House version passed in October claims that the Internet facilitates “ideologically based violence…by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist related propaganda.”
Profit vs. privacy. Control of speech, invasion of privacy, and collusion between government and big business are inherent in the profit system’s desire to run the world with a minimum of expensive, disruptive dissent.
Currently, ATT is being sued for cooperating with the National Security Agency to illegally wiretap telephone calls and forward Internet messages to government screeners. In return, the Federal Communications Commission scratches ATT’s back by resisting the enforcement of Internet neutrality.
Confidentiality also loses to purely commercial considerations. Several Internet phone companies offer free long distance to members of the popular social networking site Facebook. The calling service is paid for by advertisers who use Facebook’s highly detailed user profiles – age, gender, education, network affiliations, and location – to deliver a powerful targeted message.
Similar issues arise with search engine Web sites that offer free (that is, paid-by-advertising) email. The sites may keep records linking the user’s identity to the information they seek on the Web.
Many young people who enjoy networking on MySpace do not know that Rupert Murdoch bought the site and all its data so he could advertise to their MySpace “friends.”
But those aware of the threats posed by corporate control of communication are fighting for open access and free speech on the Web. The ultimate solution is to defeat privatization by returning the Net to its public origins and nationalizing the capitalist media empire.