We're going down the road of creating a bandwidth cartel in much the same way we have an oil cartel, writes Tim Wu:
Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.
Wired connections to the home — cable and telephone lines — are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments — similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.
I like this new way that Tim's framing the issue, especially with the price of gas today setting new, ever higher records. It works well: wireline Internet is to oil as wireless Internet is to solar/wind/etc. (Is that right? I can never get that A is to B as C is D thing right. Anyway, I trust you get the drift.) But the point is that having just a few hands on just one nozzle is a bad thing whether it comes to oil or Internet, an argument that seems to particulary hit home when gas is topping $4 a gallon.
China and the IOC are now saying that journalists covering the Olympics won't exactly have access to a long-promised unfettered Internet:
Journalists covering the Beijing Olympic Games will not have completely uncensored access to the internet, Chinese and Olympic officials say.
Sites related to spiritual group Falun Gong would be blocked, officials said. Journalists also found they could not see some news or human rights websites.
China enforces tough internet controls, but said when it bid for the Games that journalists would be free to report.
A senior IOC official apologised for misleading journalists on the issue.
"I'm not backing off what I said," International Olympic Committee press commission chairman Kevan Gosper told the South China Morning Post.
"There will be full, open and free internet access during Games time to allow journalists to report on the Olympics," he added.
"But I have also been advised that some of the IOC officials had negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked."
An "open Internet" with "some sensitive sites...blocked" is somewhat like "a little bit pregnant."
Is it just me, or was an open Internet one of the very requirements that China agreed to abide by when it was awarded the games, a plum prize from the world community? Yep, pretty sure I'm right about that. And now when push comes to shove, they say, "when we said 'open,' we meant everything except for anything having to do with our political enemies or a free press or..."
Somewhere, Jingjing is smiling.
UPDATE: Former Berkman center fellow and University of Hong Kong professor Rebecca McKinnon has some tips for journalists on how to do their jobs well in Beijing.
At the Computers, Freedom, & Privacy Conference at Yale tonight, a number of my dinner companions insisted that Raul Castro had lifted the restriction on ordinary Cubans accessing the Internet. I said that was not the case, but backed down out of sheer wussiness. I need to work on that. The new Cuban leader has indeed allowed Cubans to buy personal computers, but tis a far, far different thing than allowing unfettered access to the World Wide Web.
