The Fight for Free Speech: Will We Be the Greatest Generation?
In many ways, there was more free speech before the printing press was invented than at any time since. Yes, we have more rights today to criticize government, but strangely, until recently technology has reduced each individual’s ability to effectively do it. The Internet offers the promise to advance free speech to unprecedented levels — but it won’t happen unless some of us shut up and the rest of us speak up.
Before the printing press was invented more than 500 years ago, we may not have been free peoples, but we did have relatively free speech as individuals. News was spread by word-of-mouth, and everyone could contribute to what was in the news. Even governments had to compete to be heard like everyone else, which they did for instance by hiring colorfully-garbed minstrels who sang their version of the news.
While the printing press may have been a great leap forward for the spread of information, it also represented two steps backwards for free speech. First, these large, hard-to-conceal machines now allowed governments to stifle criticism, by identifying those responsible for spreading information to the masses, and subjecting them to prior restraint, licensing, censorship, and punishment.
Second, the printing press pulled the masses out of the center arena, and transformed news from a participant sport to a spectator sport.
News no longer consisted of our individual voices, but those of elites often from remote places, or as NYU Professor Mitchell Stephens put it, “As the news we receive has begun to abandon our streets and communities in favor of momentarily more exciting locales across town or even overseas, our ability to participate in news has diminished … the bulk of humanity appears to have been pulled from the stage and seated in the balcony, our opportunities to make news on our own reduced to the occasional chance to wave should a television camera deign to pan our crowd.”
Technological advances in printing that came later further reduced the number of voices, and so were even harder on free speech. When the steam engine was harnessed to the printing press, newspapers suddenly engaged in stiff competition to bring their price per copy down to a penny. Only papers with the highest circulations could achieve this while paying for the expensive new equipment, putting many papers with alternative voices out of business. A similar phenomenon happened in the mid-20th century when the superior offset printing process was introduced.
The introduction of broadcasting not only eroded the number of voices, it actually reversed free speech, placing government back in control of news. European governments co-opted television and ran their own government-friendly broadcasts. In the U.S., government control of news became just as real, but it happened differently. Our government seized control of the broadcast spectrum, declaring frequencies a precious resource that must only be used by responsible corporate citizens. Accordingly, networks were required to reapply for licenses every few years, with renewals contingent upon satisfied politicians and their appointees.
Such was the unfortunate environment in which CBS founder William Paley invented network TV news — it would deliver programming that highlighted government issues, giving it the importance politicians felt it deserved. Paley thereby found a way to prove his network was a responsible corporate citizen, reducing the risk that the government would revoke his highly valuable license to broadcast his highly profitable entertainment programming. It was clear from the outset that CBS launched TV news for politicians and not profit. It would be another 20-30 years before the program made money, which news head Dick Salant famously announced to his staff as both good news and bad news.
Why bad news? Because after that, management would actually start caring whether his news department even made a profit. Now you know why broadcast news remains plain vanilla, establishment-friendly fare, a free-speech-embarrassment when compared to politically hotter, unregulated cable TV news.
With radio, the negative impact of government regulation on free speech is even more well-proven. In 1949, the FCC introduced the “Fairness Doctrine” that forced radio stations to air contrasting views whenever political opinions were expressed. To avoid trouble, radio stations avoided political talk. The extent to which this squelched free speech was not fully understood until the rule lapsed in 1987, immediately launching the new era of politically-charged talk radio.
Which brings us to the Internet — a new platform that allows everyone to have a voice — much like the old days when news was spread by word-of-mouth. To date, the Internet has remained blissfully free of government regulation. Its backbone rests in the private sector, it requires no licensing for use, and it is seemingly beyond the reach of those who would like government to regulate online behavior such as hate speech, obscenity, and too much control by a few corporations.
So everybody is thrilled that the Internet can deliver historically unprecedented levels of free speech, right?
If that’s true, you would never know it by following the news. In a recent editorial, the NY Times welcomed federal regulation of the Internet under the benign-sounding cause “net neutrality,” warning us that Internet service providers might suppress ideas they do not like. The Times ignores the fact that the First Amendment is designed to protect us against suppression of ideas by the government, not the private sector, which has neither the power nor the motive to suppress ideas.
Moreover, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal tells us, “Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem.” It has not been given a chance to surface, much less an opportunity for the marketplace to fix this hypothetical problem. It is a weak reason to allow the irreversible step of government regulation.
Another party that is uncomfortable with free speech on the Internet is the Orwellianly-named group “Free Press.” They are pushing for the FCC to regulate the Internet similar to the way it regulates broadcast TV, calling for a national (read “government”) broadband policy to regulate price, speed, and availability. They also want the government to provide municipal broadband service to everybody, even though this model has already collapsed in the marketplace.
And of course, the U.N. and its many dictatorships is no fan of free speech on the Internet. Last November, the United Nations’ Internet Governance Forum (IGF) held its second annual meeting with a not-so-hidden agenda for a U.N. takeover of the U.S.’ private sector control of core Internet systems.
It is a sad commentary that the loudest voice against Internet regulation so far seems to be a group called Hands Off the Internet. The group is made-up of special interests — whose special interests happen to coincide with what we should all be fighting for.
Steve Boriss’s superb article that should be read by everyone. The followers of Barack “Barry” Obama will most assuredly push “net neutrality” if they have the power to do so. John McCain is bad enough on First Amendment issues. Obama would be far worse.
Note also what’s transpiring in Vancouver. The forces of censorship are arguing in the Steyn/Maclean’s tribunal that Steyn’s article was damaging to Muslims because of comments that were made on blogs in the US and Belgium. The internet is providing them with tools to attack print communication.
Similarly, the British suit against Rachel Eherenfeld was based on the claim that her book, which was not distributed in the UK, could be mail ordered in the UK over the internet.
Not only do we need to fight for freedom of speech on the internet, we have to be vigilant that the forces of censorship don’t use the internet as a tool.
Actualy, to be 100% Obamistically correct, the Title to this should be “Will We Be the Greatest Generation we were expecting?”
It’s a good fight, but one that we are bound to lose. Over half the people in the world use an internet subject to some form of government control. It is only going to get worse.
The UN is working diligently if quietly to secure control of the internet with dreams of trillions of Euros in taxes pouring into their coffers.
Ain’t gonna happen, but the UN is a mixture of Socialists and good old fashioned thieves (technically, what they do is embezzling or swindling, which IIRC in law is NOT the same thing as theft. I don’t want the UN mad at me for accusing them of something they aren’t doing.) so their economic knowledge is shaky at best. The odds of the UN killing the goose in the process of squeezing out more golden eggs is very high.
I think a lot of people have different ideas of net-neutrality. What I, and most technical people want is neutrality for the content of each packet.
Take the postal service. If I pay my $0.42 for a stamp, it does not matter what I put into the envelope. It doesn’t matter if I send it, General Motors sends it, or the President sends it. The Post Office will make sure it gets to its destination along with everything else. Now, if I don’t care about priority handling I can go for the bulk rate. Or I can now pay extra for express handling.
The problem arising on the internet is that there are a very few companies who are deciding *what* content will be allowed. They have decided that if they can get away with it, they will charge some people more than others. You and I will not be allowed to send video content without artificial barriers placed before it.
This is what I mean by net-neutrality. It is entirely acceptable to charge me a metered rate so that if I use more, or want more speed, or want priority handling (video, voip) then I will expect to pay more. However, if I pay the fee I want the same service as the big boys.
Would you find it acceptable to pay more to send a letter depending on what your name is? Would it be acceptable to charge your neighbor across the street more for his electricity or phone service just because you can? This is why it must be neutral.
Neutral does not mean you can’t charge different rates for different types of service. It just means that you can’t extort or prevent people from using the internet if they pay the going rate.
Nonsense. OF COURSE the Government will regulate the Internet, because the Internet is a rapidly growing critical piece of the world’s infrastructure. The more important question is what form that regulation will take. Net-neutrality is an interesting issue, because true net neutrality, as described by Dan, is a very good thing (and how the internet has operated from the ’70s until now – and by the way, the internet was run by the government entirely until the 1990s). On the other hand, the net is supplied by private companies, who arguably have the right to do whatever they want with their facilities.
Ultimately, some sort of regulation similar to that of common carriers (which have a net neutrality equivalent) or utilities will happen.
On the other hand, some will try to control content on the internet. Well, some already have – from China’s censorship to the US’s (somewhat justifiable IMHO) criminalization of terrorist and child porn internet content. Some content control is inevitable.
What is important is to protect free expression (in the US, within accepted constitutional limits), not keep the government completely out of the internet. The former can be done, the latter is a fools errand.
“Net neutrality” as I understand it is anti-censorship: it makes it unlawful for ISP’s to discriminate against customers’ bits based on their meaning.
Obviously if I want QoS sufficient for streaming real-time video that’s something they should be able to charge for, but ideally they shouldn’t even know if I’m using my up-QoS’d bits for video at all. All they should know is that I’m paying more for bits that arrive on time.
The flip side is requiring ISP’s to provide 9-1-1 services for VoIP or mandatory anti-virus for downloads or bittorrent copyright checks or what have you clearly violates net neutrality — from the government side rather than the private sector. If my bits are my business the government shouldn’t on principle require ISP’s to make them theirs, at least not without a warrant.
Regarding the Fairness Doctrine, I seem to remember the Republicans wanting to censor talk radio when the grass roots made their voices heard and stopped the illegal immigrant amnesty bill not too long ago… I don’t trust the Republicans in Washington DC anymore than the Democrats… it’s about time for a third party in this country with an actual platform that spells out what it stands for… so how about somebody making that happen, like yesterday, Ok?
… oh, and may I suggest that the FIRST plank of that platform be TERM LIMITS? If we elect good people to do what is spelled out in a political party platform, and hold them accountable (I know how far-fetched that word sounds in the same sentence with politicians), then I do believe there are many good people out there who would be willing to step forward and SERVE their country with a term in office, and then step aside for the next person to fulfill their civic duty… do YOU think?
I agree with Steve’s entire article, except for his main point.
Net Neutrality means that ISP’s cannot discriminate between TCP packets based on their content. This is important for a couple reasons:
Contrary to what Steve argues, ISP’s have already been engaged in the kind of bad behavior that he claims hasn’t surfaced. Comcast, for example, has interfered with BitTorrent traffic. ISP’s are coming under strong pressure from the RIAA, MPAA and the government to use “deep packet inspection” to essentially engage in wholesale wiretapping. Time Warner was recently identified as having blocked political messages that they found overly controversial.
There are very few top-tier ISP’s at the moment. While you can pick lots of brand names these days, the reality is that most of them are RESELLERS of the same small list of broadband services. (example: Name four DSL providers in your area. They ALL resell the same phone company service. It feels like competition because you have different branding, but the reason the services are all so similar is because the core product is exactly the same.) They, in turn, use a very small number of companies for their internet backbones.
The key risk from government control comes from QoS policies that Net Neutrality would prevent. With so few ISP’s out there, it is very easy for the government to regulate what can and can’t happen on the internet without resorting to legislation by collaborating with the ISP’s.
The camel’s nose is already in the tent, in the form of extensive ISP-government collaboration. The government achieves its national security goals and criminal justice goals, and the ISP gets the lever it needs to prioritize, throttle or shut down entirely applications at its whim.
For a similar situation, look at our voice networks. I’ve been working in mobile applications development for nearly ten years now. Whether you’re using Mobitex, BREW or even a wireless web application, unless you had special connections with a carrier, your application would be blocked by the network, or rendered so inaccessible as to be effectively blocked. The networks claimed they were doing this to ensure Quality of Service, but the real reason was control. They’re doing the exact same thing here, in the name of freedom– but as in the past, as soon as they have the precedents set that they want, they’ll be back in bed with whatever agencies they need to ensure their oligopoly.
There is a very good reason that conservative and libertarian programmers and net admins favor net neutrality. The moment the carriers develop the infrastructure to discriminate between packets, they’ll offer that capability as a service to the government (ours, and any others that they operate in).
I’m with Wellspring on this one.
While Steve has written a very nice article, he entirely misses the point of Net Neutrality. It is a point that should make every Conservative and Libertarian stand up and take notice.
Net Neutrality is Free Speech for the Internet. It means that I cannot be censored or prevented from accessing material that some government bureaucrat or corporate middle-manager dislikes (within the law, of course). It enforces honest business practices on ISP’s (no selling me an “unlimited use” line and then throttling my connection) and keeps companies from limiting access to information based on economic or political concerns.
In basically forces the ISP’s and the Government to view the Internet as a free and open roadway down which all may travel to disseminate and gather whatever information they wish, without restriction or toll roads.
Sorry Steve, but you are astoundingly wrong on Net Neutrality.
Support Net Neutrality, contact your Congresscritter today.
I feel caught in the middle on this issue.
First, I don’t agree with Steve that the private sector has no incentive to mess with speech. They have incentive to make profitable speech/viewing easy and unprofitable speech/viewing not easy, because that transmission of information costs money. How would that look if they acted on that incentive? We’ve seen the pre-cursors of what could be examples with Comcast and whatnot, but nothing really extreme has come to light yet. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they have motive to do it though.
Second, while I like the freedom of expression concerns of the net neutrality movement, I don’t want to stifle the market’s creativity for potentially better technologies either. Much like requiring catalytic converters for cars instead of setting standards that any technology should’ve met, there could be unintended negative externalities of freezing the technological model at its present state (through the lack of competing innovations). While I don’t have an answer to the problem, I do think it should give us caution in thinking about how to ensure our free expression.
Whoa, hold on a minute there, Bill in NY! I never heard anything like that. Got link?
Net Neutrality is necessary because the government has already regulated the Internet. The government created a duopoly for Internet access. Your choices are effectively DSL or cable. Which means you have 2 companies to choose from for Internet access. The government created this. (I won’t even go into how much money was stolen from me to build the current infrastructure.) Create true competition among ISPs and Net Neutrality will not be necessary because if I have MANY ISPs to choose from, at least one is not going to “shape” traffic on me. Most communities have competition among 2 ISPs, which anyone will tell you is not competition.
As a Libertarian, I believe government should hands off the net neutrality issue.
I don’t see why 2 ISPs is not competition, or why wireless Internet access isn’t a third option, or why if government created a problem then more government action won’t create even more problems and unintended consequences.
Only government has the coercive power to really stifle freedom (think McCain-Feingold). Private ISPs don’t.
What’s next, disallowing bakers from selling buns at a discount at night? We want bun price neutrality! Food is even more fundamental than speech.
The US is already over-regulated. If the ISPs want to discriminate against Bittorent, then Bittorent will fight (has fought) back with encryption and dynamic ports and whatever. Customers can fight back with boycotts, demonstrations, publicity campaigns. That’s freedom, that’s the free market at work. Not the deadening hand of government.
If bakers started charging more for buns if you grill cheese on them that might be a better analogy. The baker would have to follow you home and invade the privacy of your kitchen, of course, to see whether you were toasting or grilling.
What I do with my buns isn’t the baker’s business; what I do with my bits isn’t my ISP’s business.
ISP’s should no more be inspecting packets and charging different rates for different content than the phone company should charge you different rates for different topics of conversation.
Exception granted for legitimate security concerns.
I have a problem characterizing our speech as less free than it was before the coming of the printing press. You say, “In many ways, there was more free speech before the printing press was invented than at any time since. Yes, we have more rights today to criticize government,…”
The printing press was at the foundation of our freedoms we cherish, including freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, and the right to openly criticize our governments without fear of reprisal. I think that deserves more than a “Yes, but….”
It’s the X&Y Revolution
You’re absolutely right, SK.
Remember the Canadian “Sponsorship Scandal?” The Canadian government tried to censor news about that, too, but they couldn’t reach into America to shut down the websites that were reporting the story. Furthermore, the fact that Canadians were getting their news from American websites because their own news was censored became as big a part of the Sponsorship Scandal as the scandal itself.
Even if, as is becoming apparent, Canadians believe in censorship enough to keep re-electing censors to public office, those few who believe in free speech will always be able to get an “outside line” to America.
As long as America runs the internet I don’t see how it could believably be said that we live in an age where free speech is restricted. We live in an age where governments and NGO’s ATTEMPT to censor like never before but find themselves perpetually frustrated by the combination of American control of the internet and natural aversion to censorship.