As I flipped through my mail this afternoon, I was reminded that AT&T was now my phone company, itself having been gobbled up by my previous phone service, SBC, which in turn had eaten Ameritech for breakfast and Pacific Telesis for lunch. The new AT&T announced this past week that they were acquiring BellSouth, the dominant phone company in the South.
Haven’t we been through all this before? The original AT&T was broken up in 1984 after it was decided that it constituted an illegal monopoly. Now it seems that the old monopoly is being reconstituted 21 years later, and although AT&T claims that there is a lot more competition around these days, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth…but that’s not the issue that concerns me most.
AT&T Chairman Ed Whitacre has been making public his view that not only does his company want to charge customers like you and me for access to the internet, but that he wants to charge companies like Google and Yahoo for delivering their content to us. He wants to make his “pipes” a two-way street and charge companies doing business on the internet for preferential access.
The internet was conceived as, and has been since its inception, an open architecture network. No one person or company is the gatekeeper to and from any point on the network. If a destination you want to visit has a presence on the internet, you are able to type in the URL and immediately be whisked to that site in the blink of an eye. We all pay a monthly fee to have that ability.
If preferential high-speed service for certain businesses is allowed, it will stifle competition and erode the level playing field that is enjoyed by all businesses on the internet today. As the Los Angeles Times noted in an editorial this week, customers and the websites they visit shouldn’t have to pay twice to connect to each other, and AT&T shouldn’t be allowed to give any site an unfair advantage over competitors.
The other danger is AT&T has its hands in so many businesses, that it’s not inconceivable it could give a promotional advantage to one of its own, say Cingular mobile phone service, as opposed to T-Mobile or Verizon. Or it could give preferential treatment and speed to one of its own online video delivery services when that type of service becomes the norm in our households for entertainment.
It’s also been rumored that AT&T would like to adopt a pay-as-you-go plan for high-speed internet subscribers. That would be a return to the internet Dark Ages when companies like AOL charged per minute fees, or charged you per bit that traveled down the pipe.
Unless Congress and the FCC keep a close eye on AT&T’s actions in the near future, the dark vision of Lawrence Lessig as outlined in his book, Code, could be visited upon us and the internet will no longer be the democratic town square we’ve all come to rely on and trust.