internet

Writing for the Observer, Britain's Sunday newspaper, author John Naughton reminds us how Gutenberg's invention of movable type had unanticipated side effects. It would "undermine the authority of the Catholic church, power the Renaissance and the Reformation, enable the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, create new social classes and even change our concept of childhood." But who knew?

And today we have Tim Berners-Lee's gift to humanity, the World Wide Web. As Naughton writes:

"The strangest thing is how casually we have come to take it for granted. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from Easyjet and Ryanair, tickets for theatres and cinemas online, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. We check the opening times at the Louvre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York (or browse their collections) online. We check definitions (and spellings) in online dictionaries, look up stuff in Wikipedia, search for apartments to rent on Craigslist .... And of course anyone with doubts about a prospective blind date can do an exploratory check on Google before committing to an evening out with a total stranger."

Indeed. We are in the midst of a social change so vast it is beyond our comprehension.

And we are deeply addicted.

Lightning visited my home last Thursday night, laying waste to a couple of devices that hadn't been invented a decade ago (a wireless router and a cable modem). My kids would have been happier if they'd been tossed overboard mid-Atlantic. The telephone and television are trivial by comparison. Panic set in. McLuhan was right when he said invention is the mother of necessities.

The Internet has become central to our consciousness. We no longer have to know facts, just how to Google or Wikipedia them. Our friends and relatives and photographs and memories are all there. The Internet has become an extension of our minds, and we take it for granted, until it suddenly disappears.

Every time I dip a toe into the reality-distortion field that is Washington, DC, it make my head spin. I was just in Washington for an API seminar, and it happened again.

Washington has the world's largest collection of special-interest spinmeisters trying to warp the political agenda.

Wherever you go, there are TV commercials, newspaper ads, billboards, selling something that's ultimately targeted at Congress and the pseudolegislative machinery of regulatory bureaucrats. Nobody tries to sell ladies' underwear in the Washington Post any more. Instead, these these ads sell poison, depicting an alternate universe in which facts have been rewritten to the advantage of one power-hungry cartel or another.

As I dissected a Comfort Inn waffle for breakfast I encountered a big display ad in the Washington Post, and later as I flipped on the TV I was hit by a video ad with the same message from a mysterious "public interest" group: Those evil people at Google are conspiring to rob all of us by keeping us from having more video choices just when Santa Claus was going to crawl through our broadband connections with lots of new goodies. Google wants consumers to pay! Google is a giant California technomonster (cut to a photo of the sprawling Googleplex headquarters). Stop Congress from regulating the Internet!

I think I know who's picking my pocket, and it ain't Google.

It's the big cable and telcos that are behind this fake grassroots movement, spreading this lie in an attempt to stop net neutrality.

Until now, the Internet has been a fast, basically unmetered, level playing field where new ideas can be easily tried. Ideas like Skype (free telephony), YouTube (free video sharing), Shoutcast (free audio channels).

The cable and telcos want to be able to selectively discriminate against content providers that do not pay tribute or become business partners.

These price-gouging monopolists are no friend of you and me. They want the "freedom" to selectively degrade certain Internet services, especially realtime streaming media such as audio, video and telephony unless the content providers pony up and pay for guaranteed performance.

For entrepreneurial, individual and peer-to-peer multimedia, this means death. And that death is to the advantage of cable and telcos, which have their own programming and telephony services they want to sell you.

The net effect would be to turn back the clock to a pre-Internet era when a few powerful corporations controlled what we could see and how we could see it. That's not hyperbole. It's the goal. If you don't believe the cable giants are against individual publishing, read your broadband terms of service.

Content providers do pay for Internet service, as do consumers, and the cable and telcos aren't going to stop charging for broadband. They just want even more money.

How can they do that? Isn't the Internet huge, and competitive?

The Internet is very big, but the cable companies -- and it is primarily cable companies who provide the "last mile" broadband connections into the home -- have control of key choke points.

If they are allowed to demand tribute from everyone who wants to offer fat content or provide streaming services to their customers, it will come at the expense of every individual who tries to watch, listen, or talk on the net.

The latest from Pew: 48 million Americans have posted content to the Internet. The majority of them are broadband users, and broadband penetration jumped by 40 percent between March 2005 and March 2006. Significantly, broadband penetration in households with income between $40,000 and $50,000 grew by 68 percent.

Editors, please listen. If you're not rethinking your entire content strategy around participative principles, you're placing your future at risk.

Every newspaper's website can, and should, be the center of online community -- connections, sharing, conversation.

Few are.