This Prettty Much Says it All

By Bill Brown, Free Press' ingenious graphic designer.

Citizens Inundated

The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has already picked a winner in the 2012 elections: TV broadcasters.

Companies like CBS Corp, News Corp. and Sinclair Broadcast Group are already dividing the spoils of an election year that will see unprecedented spending on political ads.

More than $12 million was spent on ads during the Iowa Republican caucus. More than $14 million was spent on the South Carolina primary. And Floridians are already seeing the effect of millions more in ad buys as the state readies for next Tuesday's vote.

But that's just the first glimpse of an election year that will leave viewers awash in misinformation. All told TV broadcast companies stand to pocket more than $3 billion in political ad revenues by November. What they're not doing is letting viewers and voters in on the full story behind all this money and all these ads.

Free Press today released Citizens Inundated, a report exposing the media's role in the Citizens United problem. It traces a trail of political influence money that begins with contributions from wealthy corporations and individuals and ends up in the bank accounts of some of the most powerful television conglomerates in the United States.

Broadcast media, understandably, have no interest in shedding light on this excessive transfer of money. As a result, we are facing a crisis that threatens to undermine the most important single action people take in a democracy: voting.

Of, By and For the 1 Percent

Citizens United gave the wealthiest 1 percent unchecked power to pick and choose our nation's leaders. By November's general election, corporations and the rich will have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns and Super PACs. The bulk of this money (approximately 60 cents to every dollar contributed to campaigns) will buy televised political attack ads that often misrepresent the issues and misinform the viewing and voting public.

Rarely within their local news coverage do local stations reveal the true funding sources behind this flood of misleading ads. Nor do they devote much of their news programming to reporting that might separate political fact from fiction and engage viewers in the democratic process. It's a confidence scheme that enriches broadcast media execs, while leaving voters none the wiser.

A 2011 FCC staff report found that 33 percent of commercial TV stations air little to no local news whatsoever. For those that do air news, the picture remains dim. Nearly two-thirds of local TV news directors reported staff cuts in 2009, as bosses slashed their reporting budgets. This translates into fewer reporters on the political beat and less objective reporting about electoral issues. A 2010 USC Annenberg School report showed that in the average 30-minute local news broadcast, less than 30 seconds is devoted to hard local government news, including reporting on political campaigns.

Meanwhile, it's estimated that political ads will air up to 200,000 times before viewers become voters in November. When researchers examined sample markets with a race for the House of Representatives back in 2004, political advertising outstripped news coverage of those elections by an average of 6 to 1. In markets where Senate races took place that year, political ads exceeded news coverage of those races by as much as 17 to 1. The situation is likely to be even worse in a post-Citizens United world.

This television news failure hasn't been remedied by the rise of the Internet. Despite decades of advances in new media, broadcast television remains our most influential communications medium. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 78 percent of American viewers report getting their news from local TV on a typical day -- more than the number that rely on newspapers, radio or the Web.

Toward Transparency

Broadcasters have been unwilling to do much to live up to obligations to viewers. They balked when the FCC asked whether they should put online the political advertising information in their "public files" -- preferring to keep this information hidden away in dusty file cabinets. They unleash the full force of their mighty lobbying group, the National Association of Broadcasters, against any effort to ensure that stations, in the words of the Communications Act, "serve the public interest, convenience and necessity."

Such is the arrogance of an industry that profits from free access to our airwaves. In exchange for this free use, media companies are supposed to fulfill the news and information needs of the local communities in which they broadcast.

Broadcasters can start by more fully disclosing the financial interests that stand behind the Super PACs dominating political discourse in 2012. And broadcasters need to invest more of their election-year profits in the kind of reporting that engages viewers in political issues and increases election turnout. These changes would make voters the ultimate winners come Election Day.

Why We Go Black

Wikipedia and Google blacked out? Redditers in an uproar? Thousands of geeks abandoning their cubicles to take to the streets?

What's happening here?

Today's nationwide protest of Internet blacklist legislation is part of a brewing movement to keep control over the Internet out of the hands of corporations and governments. It's a struggle that puts Internet users before information gatekeepers. At stake is everyone's democratic right to information.

The movement owes its momentum to a recent sequence of events. Leading up to 2010 millions of Internet users became advocates in support of Net Neutrality protections. In 2011, the importance of digital freedom spilled out onto the streets as demonstrators with a mobile phones and a connection became a force in global protests.

Now, millions are rallying against two bills in Congress that allegedly protect intellectual property but go way too far, threatening to hold our free speech rights captive and stifle the creativity and innovation that's become a hallmark of the online community.

Over the weekend the White House succumbed to popular pressure and modified its position on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) saying it would not support any legislation that "reduces freedom of expression" or "undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

Rupert's Twitter Attack

The White House's change of heart gave one media tycoon fits. News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has been a staunch supporter of the most draconian curbs to Internet freedom, sent out rapid-fire series of tweets accusing President Obama of throwing in his lot with thieves, pirates and terrorists.

That Murdoch doesn't get the Internet shouldn't surprise anyone watching his recent efforts to control it. It's a campaign that goes well beyond Murdoch's MySpace miscalculation to include tens of millions of dollars spent on Washington lobbyists who are intent on passing laws to undermine the Internet's open architecture.

What's happening is that millions of people are joining to protest Murdoch and his ilk and protect our fundamental freedom to connect, link to and share information without censor or filter.

This open Internet movement is the natural outgrowth of a network that was conceived upon a principle of non-discrimination -- a network engineering ideal that had profound ramifications for democracy. According to one of its founders, Sir Tim Berners Lee, the Internet's original architecture was guided by a powerful concept: "that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up."

The First Amendment Goes Digital

Indeed, the open web evolved to become an indispensable organizing tool of social movements worldwide. It's no surprise then that the Internet would soon have a movement all its own.

Today's Web blackouts are its latest face, but the movement dates far back to the earlier days of the popular Internet -- about eight years ago -- when powerful phone and cable companies began to talk up ways they could control network traffic. Those words gave birth to Net Neutrality advocacy and engaged millions in efforts to stop industry efforts to filter or block content.

It also has antecedents in the backlash to web censorship by China and other repressive regimes. The blocking of online content from Beijing to Cairo only served to highlight the Internet's vital role in democracy movements and galvanize global efforts to pierce official firewalls and protect online activists.

And the movement has grown out of an open source community that believes decades of Luddite copyright legislation have stifled, not fostered, the online creativity and innovation that's essential to growth and prosperity.

In truth, the principles behind the open Internet movement go back much further, to the First Amendment, which was written to protect the sort of popular exchange of ideas that is the lifeblood of any democracy.

While America's founding fathers likely could not have imagined a technology that would put the power of the mass media into the hands of millions, they understood that, in the words of James Madison, a democracy must allow people to "arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."

The open Internet is the means to this power. The movement to protect it has found a voice in the millions of people who are taking action today. And the implications should be clear to any person, government or corporation that thinks it can harm our network without a fight.

Iowa Kicks Off the Media's Mud Season

If you flip on a local television station and watch for an hour or so, you're likely to see at least one: a political ad that attacks a local or national candidate.

If you live in any of the "battleground states," you'll see many, many more -- up to 12 political ads an hour.

Viewers in Iowa fell under a barrage of these ads leading up to Tuesday's caucuses. This on-air onslaught offers the rest of us a preview of what television viewing will be like as Election Day 2012 draws closer.

It's estimated that American television viewers will see such political ads aired more than 200,000 times by the first week in November. What we're far less likely to see is any explanation of who really sponsors these ads, what interests they represent and whether the content of the attacks is true.

Federal Election Commission rules require any political advertiser to tag its ad with the name of the group that is "responsible for the content of the message." But viewers rarely know the true sources of funding and power behind the names.

And the local television stations that profit from airing often misleading ads aren't eager to reveal much more. But these broadcasters face a more powerful obligation to disclose, not from the FEC but from the Federal Communications Commission, which is weighing whether or not to hold them to doing it in a truly accessible way.

Shedding Sunlight on Attack Ads

Existing lax disclosure rules explain the proliferation of ads from benevolent-sounding front groups like Concerned Taxpayers of America, Restore Our Future, Make Us Great Again and Citizens for a Responsible Government. The names might sound right and patriotic at the end of a 30-second spot, but they don't tell the whole story.

The Concerned Taxpayers of America has blanketed parts of the country with ads calling for a grassroots revolt against "stifling government bureaucracy." What viewers likely don't know is that CTA's populist front is merely the creation of two shadowy corporate spenders -- a Maryland concrete company and a New York hedge fund manager.

The FEC isn't willing to address the lack of transparency in these ads. The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision lifted restrictions on corporate political spending, making its ability to rein them in even more difficult. The FCC, however, has a federal mandate to ensure that broadcasters "fully and fairly disclose the true identity of the person or persons, or corporation, committee, association or other unincorporated group" paying for commercials.

The good news is that the FCC is finally taking a few initial steps toward such full and fair disclosure. Broadcasters are already required to maintain "public inspection files" listing the names of groups that purchase political advertising time, the cost involved and the names of executives at these organizations. The FCC has asked for public comments on a proposed rule that would force broadcasters to move this information out of dusty file cabinets and onto the Internet. If broadcasters put this data online, people will be able to access vital information without having to schlep down to their local stations.

Unfortunately, many broadcasters are reluctant to make this data more broadly accessible. In a recently filed comment to the FCC, the National Association of Broadcasters urged the agency to drop its effort to make it easier for the public to ferret out this information. The NAB argued that requiring broadcasters to post their political file online would place an unnecessary burden on local stations. Another group of broadcasters warned the FCC against any effort "to stimulate such examinations" of a station's public records by their viewers.

You read that right. In 2012, broadcasters fear a stimulated viewing public -- or at least one that wants to learn more about how local TV stations operate.

The Public Return on Investment

Before Americans vote, we need to know who is trying to influence us and why. And the FCC needs to hold broadcasters' feet to the fire -- especially in an election year in which media companies will enrich themselves with a projected $3 billion in revenue from these same ads.

Broadcasters enjoy free access to our airwaves; in exchange, they're supposed to fulfill the news and information needs of the communities in which they broadcast. They can start by more fully disclosing the names of both the front groups that place political ads and the main financial interests that bankroll these commercials.

Requiring broadcasters to put all of this political information online is a change that needs to happen now, before misleading political ads muddy our elections any further.

The FCC is poised to move in the right direction. It just needs to hear from you.

Verizon's Broadband Bunk

A recent letter to the editor of the New York Times from Verizon Chairman Ivan Seidenberg had me scratching my head today.

Seidenberg wrote to rebut a Times Op-Ed by former White House technology adviser Susan Crawford, in which she argues that the United States high-speed Internet marketplace suffers from a lack of competition, a problem that drives broadband prices up and services down for American Internet users.

"Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers," Crawford wrote. "The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight."

Broadband Backwater

Indeed. It’s gotten so bad the U.S. has gone from number one in broadband penetration at the close of the 20th century down to — depending on the survey — 18th, 22nd or 25th in the world. And Americans continue to pay a whole lot more and get a whole lot less of the Internet speeds that we deserve.

Compare our circumstances to those in Japan, for example, where Internet users are accustomed to surfing the Web at speeds of 100 Mbps (or megabits per second) at the same prices Americans pay for dial-up. In Hong Kong, one provider now offers a $20 a month “triple play” package that includes a blistering 1,000 Mbps data service.

Despite the evidence, Verizon's Seidenberg wrote that Crawford was wrong; America's Internet is the best in the world.

"America has a very good broadband story; someone just has to be willing to tell it," Seidenberg argues in his letter to the Times. As evidence he cites a 2011 World Economic Forum global survey, which in the words of Seidenberg “ranks the United States first in Internet competition.”

Say what? I had to see that for myself.

The most recent WEF "Global Competitiveness" report (pdf) features U.S. rankings on page 363. The good news is that we're ranked first in the world for available airline seats. But the United States' Internet rankings are terrible. We’re 18th in the availability of the latest technology, 18th in Internet users per capita and 26th in Internet bandwidth per capita.

Perhaps Seidenberg’s evidence is buried elsewhere. On page 294 of another WEF report (pdf) I found a section on "political and regulatory environments" that featured an Internet and telephone sector competition index.

The report allegedly looks at the level of competition for "retail Internet access services, for international long-distance calls, and for digital cellular mobile services," placing countries on a 0 (worst) to 6 (best) scale.

But it doesn't actually measure market competition beyond determining whether these three separate fields remain state-sanctioned monopolies.

Well, U.S. telecommunications isn't a monopoly anymore. We did manage to break up Ma Bell in the 1980s, but her children are showing every intention to reassemble themselves as a modern-day equivalent. But that hasn't happened. At least not yet, so on retail Internet access we get a 2, indicating that its not a monopoly market; on international long distance we get a 2; and on digital cellular mobile services we get a 2.

Our cumulative score is a 6, according to the report, the best possible ranking — or "first in Internet competition" in Seidenberg’s profoundly misleading interpretation.

Want to know who else came in “first?”

Sixty other countries, including Angola, Burundi, the Kyrgyz Republic, Venezuela and Vietnam.

We’re all Number One!

So if you are proud that the U.S. offers an Internet that's on par with, er… Angola's, stand beside Seidenberg and wave the flag.

But if you agree with Crawford that the lack of true competition in the U.S. has put us on a perilous path, demand that we do more to guarantee universal and affordable access in a marketplace with real choices.

Mayor Bloomberg's First Amendment Problem

Since the beginning of his crackdown against the Occupy Wall Street movement, Mayor Mike Bloomberg has gone to great lengths to present himself as a champion of the First Amendment. But the free speech rhetoric coming from City Hall hasn't matched the brutal reality experienced by journalists at the front lines of the protest.

In the two months since the movement began 25 journalists have been arrested covering events across the country. More than half of these arrests have occurred in New York City, including 13 journalist arrests in the last week.

My colleague Josh Stearns, who maintains a running tally of media arrests and harassment, said that the NYPD's early morning raids on Zuccotti Park on November 15 resulted in the "single worst day for journalist attacks and arrests to date."

"From the beginning, I have said that the City had two principal goals," Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement following the raids, "guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protestors' First Amendment rights."

Regarding the rights of reporters covering the Occupy protests, the Mayor is less clear.

AFP reporter Jennifer Weiss films her own arrest

His police department has worked in coordination with other departments around the country to prevent journalists from covering Occupy evictions. News crews, reporters and photographers have been herded away during police actions in Portland, Oakland and New York City.

Police have kettled others into "Free Speech Zones" -- barricaded and controlled areas where journalists are kept far from the action.

Mayor Bloomberg said the police kept the media at a distance "to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect members of the press." But according to the New York Times, one journalist told a police officer "I'm press!" and the officer just responded "Not tonight."

Many journalists who remained on the front lines were arrested, roughed up, tear-gassed or pepper sprayed. New York police put one New York Post journalist in a choke hold; Daily Caller reporter Michelle Fields was hit and forced to the ground; Lucy Kafanov of RT was struck with a baton; and countless others have been shoved and harassed. In October, Kafanov reported that police were using high-powered strobe lights to blind news and cellphone cameras and block people from recording their actions.

On Friday the mayor's office disputed our account of these violent arrests and harassment. His spokesman Stu Loeser tried to dismiss the notion that the police arrested so many or acted inappropriately saying that only five of the journalists arrested actually had NYPD-issued press credentials.

But a great number of journalists working in New York City, including myself, don't bother to submit ourselves to the NYPD's "Kafkaesque" credentialing process. Others don't recognize the NYPD's authority to determine who qualifies as a working journalist and who does not. It's likely the credentialing process itself would not survive a First Amendment challenge.

In any event, one NYPD detective admitted to Wired's Ryan Singel that the department doesn't intend to provide any press passes to journalists wishing to cover the Occupy movement.

All of this point to profound problems with the ways City Hall regards the media. As the former head of a press organization, you'd think Mayor Bloomberg would know better.

Before he again wraps himself in the First Amendment, New York's mayor needs to fully account for the trampling of these rights by his police.

Saving the Democratic Internet

Opponents of the open Internet like to portray its guiding rule, Net Neutrality, as "a government takeover of the Internet."

They argue that from the day of its inception the Internet has existed free of regulation — a perfect expression of the marketplace at work.

What they don’t understand is that the Internet is a far better expression of democracy, and as such needs rules like Net Neutrality to ensure all users have equal access to online content.

And in reality the Internet as we now know it would never have existed were it not for rules and regulation, beginning with the openness standards created by the Internet’s founders some 40 years ago, codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and updated in recent orders by the Federal Communications Commission.

Internet users often take these rules for granted. We expect to access all websites without interference. We can visit our nephew’s blog as easily as we can CNN.com.

But our ability to connect doesn’t happen in a vacuum; Net Neutrality protections are responsible for making these freedoms common to everyone.

This could change, however, if corporate Republicans get their way in the Senate this week. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is planning a Thursday vote on a "resolution of disapproval" that would void the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet order and strip the agency of any authority to stop corporations from taking control of the Internet from users.

Washington Doublespeak

Sen. Hutchison, who has AT&T’s corporate headquarters in her back yard, has long carried water in Washington for the phone and cable lobby. Her resolution couldn’t come at a worse time for Internet users. These companies are pushing plans to prioritize certain kinds of online and mobile traffic while downgrading the sites, applications and services that the rest of us may want to use.

But when speaking last week about the resolution, Sen. Hutchison got it backwards. The Internet “has created new products, new services, because it is open, because there hasn’t been a gatekeeper," she said, adding that she introduced the Senate resolution because it’s good for Internet users like you and me.

Come again? Sen. Hutchinson seeks to keep the Internet’s gatekeepers at bay by forcing through a measure that would allow companies like AT&T and Comcast to block traffic without consequences.

The hypocrisy is as thick in the House, where resolution proponent Rep. Marsha Blackburn recently said the Open Internet rules are akin to the FCC “building an Internet Iron Curtain that will restrict more of our freedom."

Did you get that? According to Rep. Blackburn supporters of the open Internet are Soviet-styled Communists, hell-bent on walling off the Web and silencing your voice.

Such is the doublespeak that emanates from Washington these days. If senators pass this week’s resolution, their digital ignorance will become a problem for the rest of us, which is why Internet users need to protest the resolution with full force.

The Internet Wrecking Ball

The phone and cable companies behind this scheme have long sought to take a wrecking ball to the Web’s democratic foundation. In their thinking they need to destroy the Internet to rebuild it to better serve their bottom lines. The needs of the rest of us are just an afterthought.

And concerns about blocking are not limited to access to websites, and they are not hypothetical. In 2007 Comcast was caught red-handed blocking people seeking to share files using the popular BitTorrent platform. That same year, Verizon Wireless rejected NARAL Pro-Choice America’s request to send text messages over its network, claiming them to be “unsavory” and “controversial.” While Verizon soon reversed this decision, its attorneys still assert the company’s right to block text messages at will.

Today, mobile carrier MetroPCS is touting a plan that bans all other video services on mobile devices in favor of YouTube. Other carriers are lining up payment schemes that will conceal whole sections of the Internet behind paywalls.

As more people use the Internet for all things media, Internet providers have massive financial incentives to make sites and services pay a premium to reach their users, and to make their users pay extra to experience the entire Internet. And with most Americans having two or fewer options for broadband in their respective markets, there's not enough competition to hold these companies in check.

Congress should not pass a resolution that lets a few wealthy corporations get away with hijacking our online rights. The open Internet is far too important to the rest of us.

Why Is Justin Bieber So Hackin Mad?

Justin Bieber is pissed off and you should be, too.

What's made Bieber so angry? A bill in Congress that could rip apart the open fabric of the internet and let corporations censor free speech.

The "Stop Online Piracy Act" or SOPA gives private entities the power to blacklist websites at will. And it violates the due process rights of the thousands of users who could see their sites disappear from the Internet for doing something as innocent as posting a video of them singing along to their favorite song.

Learning from China?

These are the sort of heavy-handed Web control you'd expect to see in China, not in the United States.

SOPA (HR 3261) not only lets companies silence websites, it also allows for banks to freeze financial deposits to the accounts of website owners, potentially forcing falsely accused Internet enterprises out of business.

The bill was intended to discourage illegal copyright violations, but it addresses this problem by giving corporations way too much authority over the way the Internet works. It deputizes the private sector with the power to disconnect the URLs of website that they believe to be behaving improperly.

It gives private entities unprecedented power to rewrite the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates your website request into an IP address in order to connect you to the correct location. After receiving a complaint from a company like Viacom or Sony Music, the government would force Internet providers and search engines to redirect users' attempts to reach the website that they chose.

The idea that SOPA would protect against online piracy and other web crimes is a pipe dream. As a technical solution, DNS re-directing is virtually useless in stopping sophisticated online piracy, but it will have a strong deterrent effect on casual producers and consumers of Internet content.

As such the consequences for free speech are grave. Imagine if your kid sister creates a "fansite" featuring videos of her singing Taylor Swift songs into a hair brush. Not only does the bill give Swift's record label the authority to "disappear" your sister's site from the Web, it also could land her in jail facing severe penalties and a long prison term.

Bieber: Throw Congress in Cuffs

In a radio interview last week Bieber called SOPA "ridiculous." He added that "people need to have the freedom... to sing songs," and that any member of Congress who supports this bill "needs to be locked up -- put away in cuffs."

At the very least Congress should wise up and kill this bill.

A Senate version of SOPA, called the Protect IP Act, passed committee approval in the spring following a massive push by brazen film and music industry lobbyists. These lobbyists are back, but now Silicon Valley companies and venture capitalists have joined forces with civil liberties groups, independent musicians and free speech advocates to stop the bill.

We can't let corporations become the Internet's judge, jury and executioner. If SOPA is allowed to stand, we could see the private sector's police powers expand to a point that undermines the fundamental openness of the Internet. And that's bad news for Justin Bieber, your kid sister, and the rest of us.

What's Going On?

Three progressive minds attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the #OccupyWallStreet protests, which have moved with tremendous speed from the margins to the mainstream.

For evidence of this look no further than the protest coverage that made the front and editorial pages of today's New York Times. For the first two weeks of these protests the Times' editors for the most part had joined with other establishment media in a communal snub of the "Occupy" activism and its relevance.

There's a reason for the rapid, organic spread of the Wall Street actions, write Glenn Greenwald, Matt Stoller and Micah Sifry, three passionate thinkers on the evolution of movements in the age of open networks.

In his Wednesday commentary for Salon, Glenn Greenwald blasted the media and establishment Democrats for their smug dismissal of the protests, diagnosing their scorn as a form of self hatred that strikes those who "feign populist opposition to Wall Street for political gain."

Greenwald writes:

"A significant aspect of this progressive disdain is grounded in the belief that the only valid form of political activism is support for Democratic Party candidates, and a corresponding desire to undermine anything that distracts from that goal. Indeed, the loyalists of both parties have an interest in marginalizing anything that might serve as a vehicle for activism outside of fealty to one of the two parties...

"[T]the people willing to engage in protests like these at the start may lack (or reject the need for) media strategies, organizational hierarchies, and messaging theories. But they’re among the very few people trying to channel widespread anger into activism rather than resignation, and thus deserve support and encouragement -- and help."

On Thursday Stoller wrote that the movement had taken on religious dimensions, which makes this protest a different animal than other politicized gatherings. "No one knows what to expect," he writes, adding:

"What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. It’s not a march, though marches are spinning off of the campground. It’s not even a protest, really. It is a group of people, gathered together, to create a public space seeking meaning in their culture. They are asserting, together, to each other and to themselves, 'we matter'."

Sifry chimed in on Saturday with a Tech President article describing the networked power of the spreading protests. "This thing is growing in Internet time and no wonder, for it is built on networked culture," he writes. (I discuss the importance of preserving these networks in an earlier article for Huffington Post).

Sifry casts the Occupy Wall Street protests in a different light as well. To him they're connected to the new political dissent that's sweeping the world:

"[W]e're no longer in a what veteran activist Myles Horton would have called an organizational phase of political activity, where meetings have walls around them, messages have managers, advocacy is centrally paid for and done by professional lobbyists, marches have beginnings and endings, and the story line goes neatly gives from petition to legislation to reform...

"I don't pretend to know where the 'Occupy' movement is going to go, though its main purpose appears to be to show first of all that it is here to stay, and to force a different perspective into a national discourse that up until now has marginalized and ignored grassroots anti-corporate social justice advocacy."

At the moment I'm seated near the shore of the Hudson River watching the sunrise break through the clouds over Manhattan.

I was awakened at 3:30 a.m. to the sound of heavy rain on the streets and immediately thought of those huddled under blue tarps in Zuccotti Square, three miles away, and of others who may have spent the night in cells following Saturday's mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge.

By inserting themselves in the midst of the problem, holding their ground against the elements both natural and man made, and applying their network strength against the establishment greed that has sunk our nation to an historical low, the "Occupy" protesters have struck upon something that connects the concerns of many.

As more people learn of their sacrifice it seems only natural that the support will grow.

(Photos: Timothy Karr)

High Noon for Internet Freedom

As democracy movements worldwide struggle to speak out via the Internet, many here in the U.S. may have overlooked an effort in Congress to undermine this basic freedom.

It takes the form of an arcane "resolution of disapproval" now wending its way through the Senate. If it passes, the resolution would void a recent Federal Communications Commission rule that seeks to preserve long-held Internet standards that protect users against blocking and censorship.

The resolution would remove these protections. It was put forth by industry-funded members of Congress who don't mind letting the few corporations who sell Internet access in America decide what we get to see, hear and read on the Internet.

These senators are also hoping the resolution will appease the most paranoid among the Tea Party faithful, who equate any consumer safeguard put in place during the Obama era with myriad and shadowy government plots.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who pushed a similar measure through the House earlier this year, stoked these fears when she said, "the FCC is in essence building an Internet Iron Curtain that will restrict more of our freedom."

Blackburn's rhetoric puts her and other supporters of the resolution far outside of the mainstream of Americans, who believe that neither the government nor corporations should be able to censor lawful content online.

If Congress succeeds in passing this measure, it will go well beyond deciding whether the FCC's recent rules are appropriate. The resolution will prohibit the agency from engaging in any effort to protect Internet freedom. The move opens the path for corporations eager to take a wrecking ball to the open architecture that has made the Internet a great equalizer for all users.

Lobbyists and lawyers working for the likes of AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have argued that these companies need to take control of your clicks to more efficiently — and profitably — manage the abundance of user-driven innovations online. They promise to be good stewards of this unruly medium if only regulators will take away the one network protection that ensures everyone's right to connect with everyone else on the Internet.

That's not what the Internet's founders intended. They built the network to be free of gatekeepers, giving each user equal access to all the legal content and applications online.

These engineers couldn't have envisioned that this open design would, in a relatively short time, evolve to make the network a potent political tool for freedom movements and democratic organizing worldwide.

But it has. Think of the explosion of Internet organizing and political expression that has swept the world in 2011, from Tunisia to Tehran to Beijing, and is now being embraced in America by protesters determined to Occupy Wall Street.

Americans cherish freedom of speech as much as people across North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. An open Internet allows all sides of contentious issues to be heard by anyone who chooses to listen. It opens up a global pipeline for protest movements, a window for millions to witness injustices and a platform on which to organize for a better future.

So ask yourself this: Do you want Congress to surrender your right to choose online to a company whose sole motive is to generate as much profit as possible? Do you want to wipe away the only protection that prevents any entity — be it corporate or government — from blocking our right to connect with one another?

The hardliners in Congress who support this resolution have joined in a pact with powerful Internet providers and free-market extremists to kill off your most fundamental online right.

It's now up to us users to use the open Internet to reclaim it.

Welcome to Your Hungarian Internet

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the U.S. has sunk to 25th in a global ranking of Internet speeds, just behind Romania.

Why? Because our nation's regulators abandoned an earlier commitment to foster competition in the marketplace for Internet access providers.

In the years that followed the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, lobbyists working for powerful providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon pressured a compliant FCC to tear down all of the important safeguards established by Congress.

Under the Bush administration, the FCC tossed out competitive broadband safeguards such as open-access requirements, which opened lines to other providers. In 2002 the agency declared that high-speed cable Internet access would no longer be considered a telecommunications service that opened the network to competitors, but rather an “information service” that did not. Following a 2005 court decision, the FCC also reclassified broadband delivered by the phone companies as an “information service.”

These were radical policy shifts that went against the long-held assumption that open communications in competitive markets were essential to economic growth and innovation.

While the U.S. blindly followed a path of "deregulation," other nations in Europe and Asia beefed up their pro-competitive policies. The results are evident in our free fall from the top of almost every global measure of Internet services, availability and speed.

About this my Free Press colleague Derek Turner writes:

"By turning its back on the 1996 Act, the FCC ordered up a future of digital mediocrity and stuck American consumers with the bill. Americans pay more per month for broadband than consumers in all but seven of the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ... When price and speed are considered together as a measure of value, we see that Americans pay more per megabit per second than consumers in many other countries. The value of U.S. connections is some four times less than that of countries like France, and is only slightly better than the value of connections in Hungary, a country with a per capita GDP nearly two-and-a-half times lower than the United States."

The lack of competition has turned America into a broadband backwater. In the aftermath of the FCC’s decisions, powerful phone and cable companies legislated and lobbied their way to controlling 97 percent of the fixed-line residential broadband market — leaving the vast majority of consumers with two or fewer choices of land-based providers in any given market.

The absence of true consumer choice has driven prices up and services down. Wednesday's New York Times reports that in some parts of the country the situation has had a direct impact on economic growth, education and public safety.

"This is about our overall competitiveness," Jonathan Adelstein of the Rural Utilities Service told the Times. "Without broadband, especially in rural areas, kids might not reach their full potential. And we can’t expect to be competitive in a global economy."

Vast Wasteland Revisited

On Monday, the top thinkers in new and old media gathered at Harvard to discuss the state of the media, 50 years after FCC Chairman Newton Minow slammed the nation’s broadcasters for creating a “Vast Wasteland” across the television dial.

Though I did not attend the event, MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman did an excellent job of reporting out via Twitter and his blog.

What’s remarkable in Ethan’s summary is the sense that, while the technology and players have shifted, the problem of U.S. media remains the same: A failure to foster the sort of public interest, independent and noncommercial media system to serve as an antidote to the dreck of commercial news and information that infects America's political discourse.

I could go on about that, and will at a later date. For now I want to put a placeholder in the important comments that were made in Cambridge (Again, as reported by Ethan).

Fifty years on and Minow still seems to have kept a Gimlet eye on the state of our media. He told participants at yesterday's event: "Politicians need massive amounts of money to buy radio and television ads. They raise money from the public to gain access to something the public owns: the airwaves."

This is because the U.S. is one of a few developed democracies that has not offered candidates free access to our airwaves. Why? Because the powerful broadcast lobby makes too much money selling ad space to them -- a number estimated to soar near $3 billion in the 2012 cycle -- and have blocked every political attempt to introduce free time.

Meanwhile their reporting on political candidates and campaigns has devolved into horse race coverage and gotcha moments, devoid of discussions of the issues that Americans say matter most in an election.

Dysfunctional

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Alter noted that today's news business is "largely dysfunctional." Much of the political news we get isn't news at all, he says, but "people like me babbling on MSNBC or Fox," rather than the sort of expensive newsgathering required to report facts on the ground.

These are common complaints made by media reformers such as myself, my colleagues at Free Press, and across the larger movement.

What's less common is the direction the discussion then takes, towards the shifting political power dynamic of social and mobile media.

Yochai Benkler, one of the world's leading thinkers on new networks, helps make the transition:

"Because we all now carry sound, video and text generating and disseminating tools – phones – we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to close the gap between what costs a great deal of money and what we all need as citizens."

Benkler alludes to something that we've been saying at Free Press for some time now: "Your phone is political." We recognize that our right to connect via mobile devices is vital to the future health of our or any other democracy.

Broken Promises

Mass media once promised to engage millions in democracy, making information available to people who were previously excluded from the political process. But the age of television seems to have done the opposite.

A survey of voter turnout in the age of television elections (1960 through 2008) shows a national average of 55 percent. In the presidential elections that occurred from 1860 through 1956, voter turnout reached an average 67 percent.

"The political conversation involves a maximum of 10 to 15 million people," Alter says, "but 130 million vote in Presidential elections."

Moreover, a survey published late last year by CTIA counts more than 300 million mobile accounts in the U.S. -- or some 95 percent of the population.

What Mobile Movement?

The link transforming mobile phone users to political speakers and participants remains tenuous, but the potential for inserting new voices in the political process is immense, as is the importance of protecting their freedom to connect.

Susan Crawford says that control over this freedom now rests in the hands of new players, not the broadcasters of old but the distributors of new. She includes massively and vertically integrated companies like Comcast among a rogues gallery of the few cable and telecommunications colossi that control both our wired and wireless worlds.

Ethan adds that "In this new world, the FCC may not be the prime mover -- the real power is located in intermediaries like Google, and if we were to push for the public interest, that’s where we’d apply leverage."

Indeed, if only we had a broader movement to do just that.

BART and the New Era of Censorship

I have spent most of the week poring over news stories, blogs and commentary on last week’s decision by Bay Area Rapid Transit officials to shut off cellphone service to quash planned protests on its trains and platforms.

Opinions are many and range from BART spokesman Linton Johnson, who says constitutional rights end the moment people walk through transit-authority turnstiles, to “X” of the hacker collective Anonymous, who protested BART’s action and said our freedom to connect should be absolute and universal.

I tend to agree with “X,” but adding my criticism to what has already been heaped on BART seems of little consequence at this point.

What does matter is the dangerous precedent set by public agencies that silence new media, and the need for clarity about our free speech rights regardless of the medium.

The San Francisco incident is not unique. Earlier this summer Cleveland’s City Council passed an ordinance outlawing the use of Facebook and other social media to assemble unruly crowds. While a mayoral veto struck down the Cleveland ruling, the overreaction is part of a spreading official backlash against political organizing on new media.

Other governments have responded the same — see China, Burma, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and beyond. In many instances they simply direct the state-run service provider and cellphone carriers to shut down their networks.

In the U.S., though, companies often flip the kill switch on their own. Verizon Wireless blocked text messages in 2007 that a reproductive rights group sought to send to its members. The carrier decided that the texts were “controversial and unsavory” and implemented a rule buried deep within the company’s terms of service that gives Verizon the power to cut off mobile communications “without prior notice and for any reason or no reason.”

That Verizon reversed its decision after its censorship was exposed by the New York Times should offer little comfort — neither should the notion that fierce public criticism has sufficiently warned BART against switching off mobile communications in the future.

These incidents reveal a growing pattern of abuse and a great measure of confusion over free speech rights in the tangled realm of new media.

“We have free speech rights everywhere. Or at least everywhere in the U.S. when government applies its power,” argues First Amendment scholar Marvin Ammori.

“If the spokesperson for BART reflects BART’s understanding about freedom of speech at stations, then BART’s leadership is wrong,” Ammori says, adding that dismissing the free speech rights of citizens in such a reckless and all-encompassing fashion puts BART on shaky legal ground.

While these are new technologies, this isn’t a new issue. People have sought to speak out using the best means available, whether that’s strapping a note to a pigeon’s leg, handing out printed pamphlets on a street corner or tweeting from the subway.

Governments have routinely sought to shut down technologies that disrupt their authority. But our basic freedoms should remain intact. Whether public and private entities have the right to silence social media and cellphone networks has become a question for the courts.

That’s why the recent uptick in U.S. censorship is cause for real concern — and reason enough for our judicial system to provide clarity on behalf of free speech everywhere.

Murdoch Façade Crumbling as Scandal Takes Root in America

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) is reportedly preparing to deliver subpoenas to News Corporation employees and others as part of its expanding investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

A separate FBI investigation is underway in response to reports that the company may have hacked into the phone messages of victims of the September 11 attacks. (Free Press is part of a larger coalition of groups urging Washington to call News Corp. executives including Rupert Murdoch to testify before Congress )

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act holds U.S. companies legally accountable for crimes committed abroad, especially bribes that are paid to foreign officials to protect and expand the company’s business interests.

News Corp. is running its own campaign to downplay these allegations, distance father and son from the alleged crimes, and contain the scandal to the U.K. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News Channel are leading the charge with carefully contrived editorials and on-air stagecraft. One person with ties to News Corp. told The Journal that the DoJ subpoenas are “a fishing expedition with no evidence to support it.”

Not according to British investigators, who received a trove of documents and emails from News International that identify at least $160,000 in bribes paid to police officers. This handover of evidence has been confirmed by more credible news outlets, including the New York Times and the Guardian, that have covered the unfolding investigations.

Robert Lenzner of Forbes writes that News Corp efforts to cover-up the scandal are now “cracking” as two former executives come forth to claim that James Murdoch wasn't telling the whole truth during his testimony before Parliament on Tuesday. One former executive, Tom Crone, should know. He served as part of the legal team that advised Murdoch, Jr. during an earlier investigation that involved phone hacking.

“When the full extent of the hacking and the amounts paid to police are known, the Murdochs’ claim [that] they knew nothing of these activities – and were betrayed – will go up in smoke,” Lenzner writes.

And as more leads indicate that crimes were indeed committed on U.S. soil -- including actor Jude Law's claim that his phone was hacked as he was passing through New York City’s JFK Airport -- the likelihood increases that this scandal will create heat for the Murdochs on this side of the Atlantic.

More fish for the frying pan.

Washington Slowly Wakes Up from AT&T's Fantasy

Congress may be finally waking up to the obvious: that the massive merger of AT&T with T-Mobile just doesn't make sense.

No amount of contributions from AT&T, or visits from AT&T lobbyists, will alter this simple truth.

On Wednesday, the Senate's top antitrust official, Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, weighed the facts and wrote a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to reject AT&T's proposed takeover.

Sen. Kohl wrote that "the acquisition, if permitted to proceed, would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest, and therefore should be blocked by your agencies."

Sen. Kohl's joined a growing chorus of opposition in Washington to the proposed merger. Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) also submitted a letter on Wednesday stating that they believed AT&T's takeover of T-Mobile "would be a troubling backward step in federal public policy -- a retrenchment from nearly two decades of promoting competition and open markets to acceptance of a duopoly in the wireless marketplace."

Opposition to this unprecedented consolidation is growing, and will only continue to grow once policymakers and the public see that the facts contradict AT&T's propaganda.

In his letter, Sen. Kohl provides a detailed analysis of the deal, and notes that T-Mobile is one of the sectors strongest price competitors, with services costing from $15 to $50 less than comparable plans on AT&T. T-Mobile is a "competitor that disciplines price increases from all three other national cell phone competitors," Sen. Kohl writes, adding that approval of the merger "raises a substantial likelihood that prices will rise."

He also notes that the merger would hand AT&T and Verizon control of 80 percent of the market, Kohl cites antitrust law, which explicitly forbids mergers that "may tend to substantially lessen competition."

Despite a mountain of evidence to support Sen. Kohl's claim, AT&T continues to say, as it did in its filing to the FCC, that "the wireless marketplace will be more competitive" as a result of this merger.

It gets worse. In response to Sen. Kohl's letter, AT&T spokesman Michael Balmoris said that the senator's view "is inconsistent with antitrust law, is shared by few others and ignores the many positive benefits and numerous supporters of the transaction."

Think about that for a second. A top AT&T flack is saying that a highly respected leader of the Judiciary Committee, who is considered an expert in matters related to antitrust, knows nothing about antitrust law, or knows less than AT&T's public relations department.

While their false claims about competition seem obvious to everyone, especially those who can count, convincing Washington to question the gospel of AT&T is no easy task.

The phone giant has spent $200 million on lobbyists and campaign contributions over the years. This astronomical sum goes a long way toward explaining why earlier this month a sum a cabal of House Democrats looked the other way and signed a letter stating that the merger would lead to billions of dollars in new investment and create thousands of new jobs.

Never mind that the opposite is true, that the merger will mark a net drop in capital expenditures for network build out and likely result in layoffs for more than 20,000 "redundant" T-Mobile employees.

In Washington, the facts too often don't hold a candle to a phalanx of industry lobbyists and a pile of campaign checks. Until now, this toxic blend of misinformation and cash has hijacked the debate surrounding this merger, and just about every other effort to reform the forces of the status quo.

The good news is that the common-sense efforts of Kohl and others are staring to unravel AT&T's fantasy. More people inside Washington have begun to see its lobbying juggernaut for what it is: a well-funded push for a government handout, instead of competing fairly in the free market.

AT&T doesn't need to acquire T-Mobile to serve rural America or improve the quality of its service. And as more members of Congress point out, this merger will kill competition and lead to higher prices, reduced investment and more unemployment.

As Washington separates fact from fantasy, the regulators at the DOJ and FCC simply need to do their jobs. They will surely have no choice but to reject this takeover outright.

Imagining what those T-Mobile ads would look like