IPAC: Neutrality, Net and Otherwise (Sen. Ted Stevens bill to screw us)

[NVMojo]

June 13, 2006

Net Neutrality is today's white-hot technology policy issue. The coalition at SavetheInternet.com (of which IPac is a member) currently includes over 800,000 individual supporters, 760 groups and 11,319 MySpace friends. They've had a tangible impact on the fight over net neutrality in Congress. While the "Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act" (HR 5252, COPE Act) recently passed the House without adopting protections for net neutrality, it still has to be reconciled with its Senate counterpart, which is likely to be Sen. Ted Stevens' "Communications, Consumers' Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006" (S 2686).

This is where things get even more exciting for people who care about information policy. The Stevens bill is a reminder of why "omnibus" rhymes with "screw the public." Whenever a bill has momentum in Congress, less-popular measures -- measures that wouldn't pass on their own -- leap from the woodwork, parasitically attaching themselves to legislation with a better chance of survival. Two such parasites on the Stevens bill are known as the "broadcast flag" and the "audio flag", which would limit the functionality of next-generation receivers of digital content.

Today, anybody can build a radio or television receiver and there are no restrictions on which devices that receiver can interact with. That has been a fertile environment for new technologies and the economies that they drive. It has also been an important factor in allowing the public to exercise a wide array of rights with respect to the media broadcast into their homes. Time-shifting for later viewing, format-shifting to different devices, and a huge selection of devices are just a few of the benefits that we've enjoyed because of the tech-neutral nature of broadcast receivers. The broadcast and audio flags would change that completely. Citing the concerns of Big Copyright, these proposals mandate that all devices capable of receiving digital video or audio signals be built in a particular fashion. That's bad for the economy and bad for the public, but Big Copyright has successfully tacked it onto the Stevens' omnibus bill. And so the fight for net neutrality in the Senate isn't just about ensuring that the backbone of the web is a level playing field. It's also about protecting the right to build multipurpose technologies whose designs are not dictated by Hollywood or the FCC.

more...

http://ipaction.org/blog/2006/06/neutrality-net-and-otherwise.html

[necso]

1. The piece has a couple of good links:

http://www.eff.org/IP/digitalradio/,

http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/,

both at EFF.

There's a big push on to severely limit a "buyer's" ability to access/use media that he has paid for -- or even that is "given away".