{"id":192,"date":"2013-01-17T14:17:42","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T19:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/captive-cable-audience-susan-crawford.html"},"modified":"2013-01-17T14:17:42","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T19:17:42","slug":"captive-cable-audience-susan-crawford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/captive-cable-audience-susan-crawford.html","title":{"rendered":"Captive cable audience —Susan Crawford"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n
\n<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nAffordable high-speed Internet access would bring us
\njobs, community, “online commerce and services, the ability to reach world
\nmarkets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate” and
\n“a wealth of economic activity and information”
\nwrites Susan Crawford, a very savvy and experienced communications law professor
\nwho has been recommended by many as a potential chair of the FCC,
\nwho also explains why we aren’t currently getting it.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Diane Rehm Show 10 January 2013,
\n
\nSusan Crawford: “Captive Audience”<\/a>,
\nand that’s the title of her book,
\n
\nCaptive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age<\/a>,
\nexcerpted here:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nThe sea change in policy that led to the current situation has
\nbeen coordinated over the past twenty years by legions of lobbyists,
\nhired-guneconomists, and credulous regulators. The cable companies
\nhave no incentive to upgrade their core network hardware to ensure
\nthat advanced \ufb01berconnections are available to every home
\nthroughout the country. Communications companies describe globally
\ncompetitive high-speed access as aluxury, just as the private
\nelectricity companies did a century ago.\n<\/p>\n

\nYet communications services are now as important as electricity.
\n
\nToday if you asked American mayors what technology they most want
\nfor their city, the majority would say, \u201caffordable high-speed
\nInternet access.\u201d<\/span> And they want these networks not simply for
\nthe jobs created to construct them but because the Internet brings
\nthe world to their community.
\n
\nHigh-speed Internet access gives towns
\nand cities online commerce and services, the ability to reach world
\nmarkets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate. It brings
\na wealth of economic activity and information.<\/span>
\nBut despite these
\nmanifold bene\ufb01ts, Americans continue to treat such services as the
\nexclusive domain of private monopolies and as luxuries
\nobtainable only by the wealthy.\n<\/p>\n

\nNot coincidentally, the United States has fallen from the forefront\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

\nof new developments in technology and communications. It now lags
\nbehind countries that long ago de\ufb01ned communications as
\n
\na public, and publicly overseen, good.<\/span>
\nAmerica is rapidly losing the global
\nrace for high-speed connectivity, as fewer than 8 percent of
\nAmericans currently receive fiber service to their homes. And the
\ncountry has plateaued: adoption gains have slowed sharply, even
\nthough nearly 30 percent of the country is still not connected.\n<\/p>\n

\n
\nNot surprisingly, cost is the most commonly cited reason people in
\nAmerica do not subscribe to high-speed Internet access, and
\nnonadoption is closely tied to economic status; lack of data access
\nreinforces other inequalities. Meanwhile, the future of start-up
\nbusinesses, independent programmers, the computing industry, the
\nquality of life of many Americans, and free expression online are
\nall in jeopardy; neither businesses nor people can count on fast,
\nopen access to new markets, new ways of getting an education, new
\nways of obtaining health care, and new ways of making a living.
\n<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nIt is clear from extensive evidence around the world that this
\npublicly supervised infrastructure should be made available to
\neveryone and provided on a wholesale basis to last-mile competitors
\nin order to keep speeds high and prices low. Yet vertically
\nintegrated incumbent monopoly communications providers have every
\nincentive to discriminate in favor of their own information and
\ncontent\u2014to the detriment of innovation coming from the rest of
\nus, and to the detriment of the \ufb02ow of information
\ngenerally. America has emerged decades after the breakup of AT&T with
\na communications system that has all the monopolistic
\ncharacteristics of the old Bell system but none of the oversight or
\nuniversality.\n<\/p>\n

\nYet this inequality is not irrevocable. It is not a product of
\n\u201cmarket forces\u201d
\nabsent human intervention. But to fix it, a new approach is needed…\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nFor what she recommends, see
\n
\nnext post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Affordable high-speed Internet access would bring us jobs, community, “online commerce and services, the ability to reach world markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate” and “a wealth of economic activity and information” writes Susan Crawford, a very savvy and experienced communications law professor who has been recommended by many as a potential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,14,15,2,41,19,132,20],"tags":[8736,8704,8705,8701,8699,8718,8709,8741,8702,8710,12,7,877,6],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-economy","category-education","category-government","category-health-care","category-history","category-internet-access-speed","category-law","tag-activism","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-georgia","tag-government","tag-health-care","tag-history","tag-internet-access-speed","tag-lake","tag-law","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-susan-crawford","tag-valdosta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}