AUSTIN, Texas – Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said he will introduce antitrust legislation to curb the influence of telecommunications lobbyists, but that effort will ultimately fail without the support of artists involved in online technology.
Franken, who kicked off a number of panels debating network-neutrality issues during the Interaction portion of the South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival, showed appreciation for the Austin community’s willingness to assist artists and help them thrive in the hill country of central Texas. Notes from Franken’s presentation include how musicians leverage the Internet for marketing purposes but are in danger of paying tiered services for content, which he says would limit the size and scope of bandwidth capabilities for independent business.
Consumers as a whole are tied to the issue, while those in the business of the Web could be affected on a greater scale, especially those who use direct distribution. As an example, Franken warned of companies such as Comcast Corp., which has taken action to charge Level 3 Communications Inc. more for services used by Netflix Inc. to stream movies on its network. Adoption of such practices could affect pricing and options for entertainment online and hurt those who are in creative fields such as film, music and development.
“You’re not just tech innovators – you’re job creators,” said Franken. “The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these enormous companies.”
At a debate on net neutrality later in the day, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation( EFF), and John Bergmayer, staff attorney for Public Knowledge, discussed the issue with moderator Maggie Reardon, a senior writer at CNet. The panel agreed that Franken got “the gist” of the net-neutrality issue, but that it is a concept that is hard to explain, adding that the net-neutrality debate involves whether all applications and systems on the application layer should be treated equally, if users have control over possible options and how lack of competition may cripple consumer options.
The Federal Communications Commission’s proposed net-neutrality plan calls for few restrictions of wireless broadband besides a side note concerning transparency, which serves as an ambiguous term. AT&T Mobility has a cap on wireless data services and charges based on use, but the company will now extend the caps to landline access, with a 150 gigabyte per month restriction for landline DSL customers and a 250 GB restriction for U-Verse users.
Cohn noted that likely the net-neutrality debate will be tied up in the courts for some time and little will affect the debate for the next two years, but changes could come in the 2012 presidential election. Bergmayer said the threat of regulation may be enough to keep companies from overreaching but that entry and competition are important, and that the idea of tiered model pricing may or may not be appropriate, depending on implementation. He used high prices for international roaming fees as an example of how the tiered-pricing model doesn’t work well.
