Past time, really. Here, Bruce Kushnick (one of the best analysts on communications policy around) and David Rosen lay out the quite rational (and democratically essential) reasons why.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the oil pipes defined America. As the 21st century emerges, the information pipes define America and the world.

A century ago, a courageous muckraker, Ida Tarbell, wrote a series of articles that lead to the breakup of Standard Oil, which had become a trust controlling the energy and associated industries to fix prices, restrict competition and harm the nation.

Today, the “communications trust” — AT&T, Verizon and the major cable companies of Comcast and Time Warner — controls the two wires and the wireless networks that link the nation’s homes, businesses, schools and other institutions. The communications trust has failed America. A few examples illustrate this failure:

* America is now 15th in the world in broadband. While Hong Kong and other countries are rolling out 1 gigabit speed services, America’s average is a mere 5 mbps (i.e., 1,000 mbps = 1 gigabit).
* Americans paid over $340 billion for broadband upgrades that never happened; by 2010, America should have been completely upgraded with fiber optic services to every home.
* The FCC approved Comcast’s acquisition of NBC-Universal, foreshadowing a likely wave of integration of transport or carriage and content.
* Together, AT&T and Verizon control 80 percent of all wireless services and AT&T is now attempting to close down one of the only remaining competitors, T-Mobile.

AT&T has proposed a major rate increase, known as “broadband caps,” on high-volume video distribution targeting initially heavy movie users. This sets the stage for a two-tier pricing model that could effectively end net neutrality. The full effect of these and many other actions by the trust, working through “captured” FCC and state public utilities commissions (PUCs), will be the erosion of Universal Service, further harming those most vulnerable.

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The telecom trust is systematic ripping off the American consumer. Three examples are illustrative:

* The telephone companies have pocketed an estimated $340 billion — or about $3,000 per household through hidden rate hikes, depreciation allowances, write-offs and other schemes; Al Gore’s promise to build out a truly 21st century fiber-optics infrastructure remains unfulfilled.
* AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and other giant wireless companies saved an estimated $8 billion on wireless spectrum by claiming to be “very small businesses.”
* Comcast, Time Warner and other cable companies received about $46 billion — $600 per subscriber — by promising to upgrade to fast broadband, through what is known as a “Social Contract,” to subscribers’ homes as well as public institutions like schools and libraries; this promise remains unfulfilled.

Forgotten today, the breakup of AT&T took nearly a decade to wind its way through the courts. It began in 1974 with MCI’s anti-trust lawsuit. The suit was picked up by the Carter administration; it charged AT&T with violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The suit charged AT&T with monopolizing long-distance service and equipment manufacture largely through the exclusionary practices of its local operating companies. At that time, AT&T was America’s largest corporate and, in 1956, during the Eisenhower administration, it had successfully suppressed a similar antitrust suit.

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Insightful and informative interview with Columbia law professor Tim Wu about his book The Master Switch. It poses some really relevant questions regarding the future of the internet, and how it can very potentially become the domain of a few media technology conglomerates, just like practically every other new communication technology became.

“Information technologies give rise to industries, and industries to empires.” Wu says this cycle ultimately destroys the innovative spirit that creates new information technologies and the openness that typifies them in their early years.

In his book, The Master Switch, Wu asks if the Internet is next.

Listen to The Past And Future Of Information Empires, featuring an interview with Wu with NPR’s Robert Siegal.

Read this article from the Wall Street Journal with Wu regarding the thesis of his book.

This recently published report from The Benton Foundation should be disturbing to anyone interested in a publicly accessible media system, one that is designed to serve people’s interests as citizens, and not as consumers.

Benton and our friends at the Alliance for Communications Democracy (ACD) wanted to get a feel for the state of public, educational and government (PEG) access across the nation. We wanted to see if PEG channels are realizing the promise and optimism expressed back in 1984 by the House Commerce Committee in a report that set forth the reason why these channels are so important.

Read about the report Here.

You can also get the latest updates from the Alliance For Community Media on supporting the current legislation designed to challenge this state of affairs, and save public access in America. It contains information and resources on how you can help support the CAP Act, H.R. 1746. A template letter of support and request for co-sponsorship, as well as a summary of the Act are available. Any help you can provide is most appreciated.

Please contact your Congressional representative and ask them to co-sponsor and support the CAP Act! Keep checking the ACM website as more information and resources are added as this issue develops.

“Our philosophy and our choice in publishing in the beginning was, to some degree, to spread the philosophy of James Madison to the rest of the world. Which is that for people who intend to govern themselves, they must have the power that knowledge will bring, because knowledge will always rule ignorance…Philosophically this organization takes its heart from the American Revolution.”

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, initially “appalled” at the publication of thousands of government documents via WikiLeaks, comes to new perspectives regarding the potential effects, the importance of, even the necessity for doing so. Recommended read, particularly for those skeptical of the work of WikiLeaks. Of particular note is Giraldi’s listing of various examples of classified information being “leaked” by various scions of the governing and media establishment elite, and the resulting abject hypocrisy of these same entities in their vehement protestations against WikiLeaks for doing what they themselves engage in for their own personal gain.

Call me Saul on the road to Damascus. I have seen the light. As a former intelligence officer, I was initially appalled at the leak of a quarter of a million classified documents by someone who had responsibility for protecting them. I was highly skeptical of the entire WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning saga but following the leaks has convinced me that there is a lot of material that deserves a public airing to demonstrate to the American people how Washington is pursuing a senseless policy almost everywhere in the world.

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The WikiLeaks plus Manning story has truly revealed that the US government will do anything necessary to silence its critics, legally or illegally. The way in which it is orchestrating a highly questionable international effort against both WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is despicable. There exists a sharp divide between those who believe government secrets should always be protected at all costs and those who believe that secrecy in government exists only to conceal official misbehavior. Obviously there is a middle ground hidden somewhere between the two, but those who favor the narrative that accepts that there is a nefarious government in Washington ruthlessly manipulating a world empire have pretty much gotten it right. The documents and the Obama Administration behavior together tell the tale.

There is an enormous amount of hypocrisy in those who are defending the government’s right to over-classify and deny access to the information that has been used to justify going to war, among other crimes. Insiders in government have no qualms about abusing classified information as long as it suits their purposes. Dick Cheney used insider secret information to “out” CIA officer Valerie Plame to punish her husband. The White House leaked intelligence that turned out to be bogus to Judith Miller at the New York Times to make the case for going to war against Iraq. George Tenet, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote a book called In the Eye of the Storm, which earned him in excess of $4 million. He worked in a SCIF (which stands for sensitive compartmented information facility) run by the defense and intelligence contractor SAIC and had access to all of his classified “papers” to help him write the book. Bear in mind that he was retired, with no official status at the time, was writing something for profit, and was using freely provided government resources to turn a buck. There was apparently no problem in his using classified material.

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Likewise, its release of bundles of documents relating to the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan served a good purpose in revealing that the US government was lying about both wars and ignoring its own intelligence analysis to continue to blunder around like a blind elephant in a small room. As the documents continue to appear they tell a tale of how the American empire is run and how, like an iceberg, most of it is concealed beneath the surface, hidden from public view.

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The United States should not be mounting a huge international campaign to silence WikiLeaks, nor will it be successful. Nor should it attempt to “regulate” the internet, which is the inevitable next step. And the attempts to personally punish Assange, which might succeed, are a measure of how low America and its allies in Europe and Australia have sunk. He has broken no law even in an age of Patriot Acts and Military Commissions and the charges against him in Sweden appear to be a set-up. Once upon a time there was a rule of law in the United States and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, but no longer. Ultimately WikiLeaks will rise and fall based on its credibility and its ability to tell stories that are being suppressed elsewhere and that the public believes should be heard. WikiLeaks must be allowed to speak.

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What do AT&T and Communist China have in common? Tim Wu tells you in 5 minutes how state and corporate censorship work the same with the internet. Excellent short primer for those who like to use the internet and want to keep using it the way you have been.

This is primarily a discussion about the nature of American infrastructure, and the internet is the infrastructure of our time.

Wu points out here how in the 19th century, control over railroad networks were where power was concentrated (a system which became a discriminatory network, by the way, with elite, monopolistic control over it). In ages of abusive monopolies and trusts, behind every one of those monopolies of power lies a network, one that has been co-opted and turned into a discriminatory network, which is then used to further the power of the monopoly

When infrastructure is designed to serve the public, the country is richer, freer, better. Today, the question regarding access to and control over the internet should not be an issue one thinks about as a marginal or side concern, but is an issue critical to the future of the country, economically and politically. And the key to making the effective breakthrough in the discussion over the infrastructure of speech control is by placing the issue squarely within the arena of rights.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the Egyptian dictatorship doesn’t seem as concerned with the American-based media. Could it be the U.S. corporate media just doesn’t pose the meaningful, real world threat that actual journalism does to illegitimate anti-democratic power establishments?

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the actions of Egyptian authorities to disrupt media coverage by Al-Jazeera and calls on them to reverse the decision immediately.

Shortly before 11 a.m., Al-Jazeera announced on the air that Anas al-Fiqi, information minister in the cabinet that was dismissed on Friday, had ordered the offices of all Al-Jazeera bureaus in Egypt shut down and the accreditation of all network journalists revoked. The official Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported that the order was to take effect on Sunday, and transmissions originating from Egypt ceased within an hour of the announcement. The discharged information minister ordered “the relevant government agencies to take the immediate legal measures necessary to revoke the licenses for live satellite transmission equipment (S.N.G.) and fiber optic cables or any other means of communication provided to Al-Jazeera,” MENA reported.

“The shutting down of Al-Jazeera is a brazen violation of the fundamental right of Egyptians to receive information as their country is in turmoil,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “The international community should prevail upon President Mubarak to lift this censorship immediately.”

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Internet connectivity, a vital resource for local journalists and those reporting from Egypt to the rest of the world, continues to be almost non-existent in Egypt, with more than 90 percent of connections to the wider Internet shut down. CPJ research indicates that this is a deliberate, coordinated result of Egyptian government orders to local Internet service providers. CPJ urges the government to rescind any such directives and order the restoration of Egypt’s connections with the outside world.

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The information wars have begun and the preeminent rights battle of the 21st century, that for the right of communication, is well underway. Time for drive Article 19 of the UDHR into international legal code, and domestic constitutional law everywhere.

The day that Egypt unplugged the Internet

About a half-hour past midnight this morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead.

Almost simultaneously, the handful of companies that pipe the Internet into and out of Egypt went dark as protesters were gearing up for a fresh round of demonstrations calling for the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, experts said.

Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent.

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In fact, there are few countries anywhere with all their central Internet connections in one place or so few places that they can be severed at the same time. But the idea of a single “kill switch” to turn the Internet on and off has seduced some American lawmakers, who have pushed for the power to shutter the Internet in a national emergency.

The Internet blackout in Egypt shows that a country with strong control over its Internet providers apparently can force all of them to pull their plugs at once, something that Cowie called “almost entirely unprecedented in Internet history.”

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In 2009, Iran disrupted Internet service to try to curb protests over disputed elections. And two years before that, Burma’s Internet was crippled when military leaders apparently took the drastic step of physically disconnecting primary communications links in major cities, a tactic that was foiled by activists armed with cell phones and satellite links.

Computer experts say what sets Egypt’s action apart is that the entire country was disconnected in an apparently coordinated effort, and that all manner of devices are affected, from mobile phones to laptops. It seems, though, that satellite phones would not be affected.

“Iran never took down any significant portion of their Internet connection — they knew their economy and the markets are dependent on Internet activity,” Cowie said.

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“There’s no way around this with a proxy,” Cowie said. “There is literally no route. It’s as if the entire country disappeared. You can tell I’m still kind of stunned.”

The technical act of turning off the Internet can be fairly straightforward. It likely requires only a simple change to the instructions for the companies’ networking equipment.

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The Egyptian government has ordered all mobile telephone operators to suspend services “in selected areas” of the country, says Telecoms company Vodafone.

As one British poster aptly commented on some of the implications of this issue…

If we get another control freak like Gordon Brown in power and a weak opposition, we could easily find ourselves being “protected” from the internet. Look how they wanted to monitor EVERY mobile phone conversation, text and e-mail we sent . . . that’s only a few steps away from controlling EVERYTHING in our lives . . . and if it meant clinging onto power “for our own good”, as we would no doubt be told or to “protect us from terrorism” which we have been told, they would do it in a New York second.

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Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps was the only FCC commissioner to dissent from the order allowing Comcast and General Electric to enter into a complicated joint venture that will give Comcast control of NBC Universal. Here is his statement.

Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal is a transaction like no other that has come before this Commission — ever. It reaches into virtually every corner of our media and digital landscapes and will affect every citizen in the land. It is new media as well as old; it is news and information as well as sports and entertainment; it is distribution as well as content. And it confers too much power in one company’s hands.

Read The Full Statement

Looks like we’ve finally been able to identify an actual life put at risk due (in part, at least) to the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks - that of the autocratic Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (actually that’s *former* president, an addendum to Ben Ali’s title helped made possible by those same WikiLeaks revelations, as well).

While the rioting and other spontaneous violence would seem to differentiate these recent events from the overwhelmingly nonviolent movements that brought down dictators in the Philippines, Serbia, Poland, Chile, and elsewhere, it was the nonviolent aspects of the uprising that proved most decisive. The general strike, the peaceful protests, the refusal to obey curfew orders, the explosion of alternative media, and other acts of nonviolent resistance were far more critical in the downfall of the regime than the violent mob actions, which make for such exciting imagery in the international media, but which were not representative of the movement as a whole.

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One important aspect of what some have labeled the “Jasmine Revolution” is the role of the Internet. Ben Ali had imposed some of the heaviest press censorship in the Arab world, leading to an unprecedented level of reliance on the Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Whenever the government tried to block access, ways were found to bypass the censors. (Among the signs at demonstrations was “Freedom From 404″ - the Internet error code for “File Not Found.”) Hacktivists retaliated by jamming government web sites. While it is important not to overemphasize this aspect - it was people on the streets who made the uprising possible - it is a reminder of the possibilities available for social movements even in countries under repressive regimes.

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Indeed, rather than praise Tunisia’s largely nonviolent pro-democracy movement and condemn its repressive regime, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Tuesday prior to the regime’s overthrow expressed her concern over the impact of the “unrest and instability” on the “very positive aspects of our relationship with Tunisia,” insisting that the US is “not taking sides” and that she will “wait and see” before even communicating directly with Ben Ali or his ministers. Clinton acknowledged the economic problems besetting Tunisia and its neighbors by noting that “one of my biggest concerns in this entire region are the many young people without economic opportunities in their home countries.” Rather than calling for a more democratic and accountable government in Tunisia, however, her suggestion for resolving the crisis is that the economies of Tunisia and other North African states “need to be more open.”

In reality, however, Tunisia - more than almost any country in the region - has followed the dictates of Washington and the International Monetary Fund in instituting “structural adjustment programs” in privatizing much of its economy and allowing for an unprecedented level of “free trade.” These policies have increased rather than decreased unemployment while enriching relatives and cronies of the country’s top ruling families. The US has also been backing IMF efforts to get the Tunisian government to eliminate the remaining subsidies on fuel and basic food stuffs and fuel and further deregulate its financial sector. Adopting this neoliberal model also grossly exacerbated inequality between the coastal areas and the interior and southern regions, where the December protests originated.

A 2009 State Department cable recently released by WikiLeaks described Tunisia as a “police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems” and that “President Ben Ali is aging, his regime is sclerotic and there is no clear successor.” The country’s elites were described as almost Mafia-like in their complex networks of control, ripping off enormous wealth from almost every sector of the economy, and a series of WikiLeaks documents vividly described the extravagant lifestyle and related egregious behavior by the families of the president and his in-laws.

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