Welcome to our publication “Open Internet”
Edited June 2, 2022 — two months after the original publication of this article, I suffered a serious spinal cord injury on April 18, 2018, which left me partially paralyzed. With years of physical therapy, the use of adaptive devices and smart technology, I have again been working on technology for Social Impact.
The start of this publication is dedicated to the memory of John Perry Barlow.
Yesterday marked 22 years since EFF and Freedom of the Press Foundation founder, John Perry Barlow, wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Two days ago, Barlow died in his sleep on the night of February 7, 2018 at the age of 70. Barlow was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead.
On December 14, 2017 FCC Chair and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai and fellow Republican commissioners repealed Net Neutrality rules. According to the NY Times:
The agency scrapped the so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone service.
PROTECT THE INTERNET AND LANGUAGE
Not only is the Internet under siege, language itself needs to be protected from those who wish to obfuscate what they are really planning. H.R.4682 is the Open Internet Preservation Act, sponsored by Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-7), which was introduced on December 19, 2017. According to Gizmodo:
Blackburn’s bill doesn’t prohibit ISPs from charging content creators like websites or streaming services for paid prioritization services. Because everyone will be fighting over a finite amount of network capacity, that’s tantamount to offering those that don’t pay up shittier service anyhow. It also reclassifies broadband Internet as an “information service,” which would prevent the FCC from ever regulating it as a Title II carrier in the future. Furthermore, the bill also prevents states and localities from implementing their own net neutrality rules and, as Ars Technica noted, would prevent the restoration of numerous consumer protections to broadband customers.
Cognitive psychologist George Lakoff has documented how conservatives have spent decades pouring billions of dollars into think tanks to manipulate language and frame issues to their advantage. Thus, we need to work hard to protect language and thereby the Internet. For many people the issue has seemed too technical for them to try to understand. Even the term “Net Neutrality” has been criticized for not being able to communicate properly what the Internet is and what is at stake. In 2022, we began a charitable, educational nonprofit, Broadband Institute Foundation as a peer to peer Network to enable Community Owned Internet Networks and help non-technical people better understand what is at stake and how to defend an Open Internet, which is so critical to Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press in the 21st Century.
SEPARATE PIPE OWNERS FROM CONTENT OWNERS
ISPs keep buying content and want to leverage controlling the Pipe (Internet Access) to disadvantage competition from other content providers. Bobby Ullery writes:
what if the (Electric Utility) reduced the voltage/amps/watts of the electricity to some of those devices because they weren’t made by companies that partner with the utility? Ohhhh, you have a Nintendo Switch? Yeah sorry, Microsoft pays us a lot of money to have electricity distribution priority… try playing your Switch again in 12 hours when your Open & Free Electric credit allowance refreshes.
Too many communities have only one or two choices for broadband Internet connections, because the territories have been divided up to reduce competition. Thus, we don’t want a few companies, who don’t compete with each other to control the pipe and then use that to further their ambitions as content owners.
TWO FRONTS FOR LEGAL AND ALTERNATIVE ACTION
Legal Action
Various lawsuits are underway challenging the repeal of Net Neutrality. Verizon has tried to have it both ways. ISPs have claimed they should not be regulated by the Title II “common carrier” section of the Communications Act of 1934. (A common carrier offers its services to the general public under license or authority provided by a regulatory body.) While former Verizon lawyer and FCC Chair, Ajit Pai, has been working to claim companies like Verizon should not be governed by Title II, we have evidence that Verizon is actually a State based utility just like gas, water and electricity. Verizon is pretending to not be a utility. However, Verizon’s entire FTTP (Fiber to the Premises), FiOS cable franchise networks, are all Title II, as they were filed with permission from state regulators, which allowed Verizon to charge customers for these ‘network upgrades’ by categorizing expenses into phone bills under the State utility.
Alternative Action
NYC Mesh has been around for several years, but the December 14, 2017 decision by the FCC has resulted in a spike of interest in the group, which is a volunteer run project of the Internet Society. NYC Mesh actually bypasses ISPs and connects directly to DE-CIX New York , a carrier and data center-neutral internet exchange point (IX or IXP). DE-CIX New York is distributed across carrier hotels and data centers in the region, including 60 Hudson Street, 111 8th Avenue, 32 Avenue of the Americas, 325 Hudson Street, 165 Halsey (Newark), 85 10th Avenue, 375 Pearl Street and 2 Emerson Lane (Secaucus), and is available at over 110 access points. The exchange supports settlement-free interconnection between Internet backbones (Peering).
NYC Mesh news updates
NYC Mesh member, Daniel Heredia, on Vice News, explains how the mesh network bypasses monopolistic ISPs and enables a Community Owned Internet Network connected directly to the Internet.
Read the NY Times article that highlights NYC Mesh and Daniel Heredia.
A FOOTNOTE:
I never had an opportunity to meet John Perry Barlow in person, but my path in a small fashion, is connected with his. While Barlow knew Bob Weir some years before, he became interested in collaborating during a Grateful Dead show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, in February 1971. In addition to having been in attendance at that show, I did the statistics for an ESP dream experiment that was coordinated with concert goers to the show at the Capitol Theater, who were instructed to send a telepathic message to a subject asleep in a dream laboratory in Brooklyn. The lab was run by Dr. Stanley Krippner who was the only ESP researcher to have ever received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health. I became frustrated with the inability to demonstrate how ESP might actually operate and I went on to get a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology (like George Lakoff).
