[Infowarrior] - The corporate toll on the Internet

[Richard Forno]

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/04/17/toll/print.html



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The corporate toll on the Internet
Telecom giant AT&T plans to charge online businesses to speed their services
through its DSL lines. Critics say the scheme violates every principle of
the Internet, favors deep-pocketed companies, and is bound to limit what we
see and hear online.

By Farhad Manjoo

Apr. 17, 2006 | To say that AT&T was once the nation's largest phone company
is a bit like describing the Pentagon as America's leading purchaser of guns
and bullets. Until its government-imposed dissolution in 1984, AT&T, which
provided a dial tone to the vast majority of Americans, enjoyed a market
dominance unlike that of any corporation in modern history, rivaling only
state monopolies -- think of the Soviet airline or the British East India
Tea Company -- in size and scope. In commercials, the company encouraged us
to reach out and touch someone; the reality was that for much of the 20th
century, you had no choice but to let AT&T touch your loved ones for you.

Now -- after a series of acquisitions and re-acquisitions so tangled it
would take Herodotus to adequately chronicle them -- AT&T is back, it's big,
and according to consumer advocates and some of the nation's largest
technology companies, AT&T wants to take over the Internet.

The critics -- including Apple, Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo --
point out that AT&T, along with Verizon and Comcast, its main rivals in the
telecom business, will dominate the U.S. market for residential high-speed
Internet service for the foreseeable future. Currently, that market is worth
$20 billion, and according to the Federal Communications Commission, the
major "incumbent" phone and cable companies -- such as AT&T -- control 98
percent of the business. Telecom industry critics say that these giants
gained their power through years of deregulation and lax government
oversight. Now many fear that the phone and cable firms, with their enormous
market power, will hold enormous sway over what Americans do online.

Specifically, AT&T has hinted that it plans to charge Web companies a kind
of toll to send data at the highest speeds down DSL lines into its
subscribers' homes. The plan would make AT&T a gatekeeper of media in your
home. Under the proposal, the tens of millions of people who get their
Internet service from AT&T might only be able to access heavy-bandwidth
applications -- such as audio, video and Internet phone service -- from the
companies that have paid AT&T a fee. Meanwhile, firms that don't pay --
perhaps Google, Yahoo, Skype, YouTube, Salon, or anyone else -- would be
forced to use a smaller and slower section of the AT&T network, what
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf calls a "dirt road" on the Internet. AT&T's idea,
its critics say, would shrink the vast playground of the Internet into
something resembling the corporate strip mall of cable TV.

The fears have been deepened by AT&T's new heft. Early in March, AT&T
announced that it will spend $67 billion to acquire BellSouth, the phone
company that serves nine states in the Southeast. The merger will make AT&T
the nation's largest telecom company, and the seventh-largest corporation of
any kind. According to one study, the new AT&T will take in almost a quarter
of all money American households spend on communications services. In
addition to maintaining a near monopoly on local phone and DSL service in 22
states, the new AT&T would provide land-line long-distance service
throughout the country; cellular coverage through its subsidiary Cingular,
the nation's largest wireless carrier; and soon, even television broadcasts
to millions of Americans.

The government is expected to approve the AT&T-BellSouth deal, but the
merger has already prompted debate in Congress and at the FCC over how this
new behemoth may control content online. Currently, there are few rules
governing what broadband companies can do on their network lines; if AT&T
wanted to, for instance, it could give you only slowed-down access to the
iTunes store unless Apple paid it a cut of every song you buy.

To fight back, online companies like Apple and Amazon, along with Internet
policy experts and engineers, are pushing the government to draw up a set of
rules to ensure what they call "network neutrality." The rules, debated this
past February in a Senate hearing, would force broadband companies to treat
all data on the Internet equally, preventing them from charging content
companies for priority delivery into your house. AT&T and other broadband
companies oppose laws to restrict how they operate online -- the free
market, they say, will ensure an even playing field. In 2005, phone
companies poured nearly $30 million into lobbying to ensure that the telecom
industry remains free of regulation.

The battle may sound wonky but its outcome could well determine the shape of
tomorrow's media universe. Increasingly, we're all using the Internet for
much more than surfing the Web; film, music, TV and phone companies are
looking at the network as the primary channel for delivering media into our
homes, and AT&T and other telecom firms are spending billions to deploy
deliciously fast fiber-optic lines to handle the expected traffic. The
regulatory tangle between broadband providers and Web companies over network
neutrality reflects a more fundamental fight over precious communications
real estate -- a battle for control of the lines that will serve as our main
conduit for media in the future.

Each side predicts dire consequences if its opponents win. Jim Ciccone,
AT&T's senior executive vice president for external affairs, says that if
broadband service is regulated, AT&T won't be able to recoup its costs for
building these new lines -- "and then we don't build the network." The Web
firms say that if the big broadband companies are allowed to charge content
firms for access to your house, we'll see the Internet go the way of other
deregulated media -- just like TV and radio, where a small band of big
companies used their wealth to swallow up consumer choice. If broadband
companies get their way, says Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital
Democracy, the Internet will one day feature nothing much more exciting than
"the digital equivalent of endless episodes of 'I Love Lucy.'"

In 2003, when Internet policy experts first began discussing network
neutrality, their primary worry was that broadband providers would strike
deals with certain Web sites to block people's access to competing sites or
services online. For instance, what if Comcast worked with Barnes and Noble
so that every time a Comcast Internet user pointed his browser to
Amazon.com, he was instead redirected to BN.com? FCC officials have frowned
upon the possibility of ISPs blocking certain Web sites, but they have not
regulated against it; Paul Misener, the vice president for global public
policy at Amazon.com, argues that "under current rules," a company like AT&T
"would be able to block us without punishment."

Although such actions are theoretically possible, most experts concede that
broadband firms wouldn't do something as brazen as blocking customers from
going anywhere on the Web; such actions would probably prompt immediate
regulation. Now Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo and others argue that broadband
firms like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are looking to institute a more subtle
kind of discrimination. They're looking to "prioritize content from some
content companies over others," Misener says.

In fact, AT&T is not at all secret about its plans. In an interview with
BusinessWeek magazine last year, Edward Whitacre, AT&T's CEO, took a hard
line against Web companies that oppose paying for high-speed access to
AT&T's customers. "What they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I
ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we
have to have a return on it," he said of Google and Microsoft. "Why should
they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense,
because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google
or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is
nuts!"

The pipes Whitacre is referring to are those his company is building under a
plan it calls Project Lightspeed, a multibillion-dollar initiative to
install high-capacity fiber-optic Internet lines into thousands of
residential neighborhoods across AT&T's service area. The company expects to
serve about 18 million households with fiber-optic lines by 2008; Verizon
has similar plans to roll out fiber lines. The new pipes will dramatically
improve Internet speeds to home customers. Today a typical DSL line
downloads data at about 1 or 2 Mbps, and cable modems run about double that
rate. Advanced fiber-optic systems will see download speeds of at least 25
to 30 Mbps. Today's DSL can barely download a single standard-quality video
stream in real time. In tests AT&T recently ran in San Antonio, Project
Lightspeed lines carried three standard-quality streams and one
high-definition stream down the line simultaneously.

What will customers do with all this broadband capacity? As the phone
companies envision it, we'll use it to watch a lot of TV. Both Verizon and
AT&T are betting heavily on a technology called IPTV, a service that
delivers television signals into people's homes over the new fiber-optic
Internet lines. According to the phone companies, IPTV will be a boon to
consumers, delivering high-quality video and advanced services like TV shows
"on demand," and providing much-needed competition to cable companies.

What's not clear, though, is what else -- besides watching TV -- customers
will be allowed to do with the new lines. This is the heart of the fight
over network neutrality. If you subscribe to AT&T's Project Lightspeed
service, will you be able to use the 30 Mbps line coming into your house
for, say, downloading high-definition movies from Apple, high-definition
home videos from YouTube, or some other bandwidth-heavy application we
haven't yet dreamed of? Or, instead, will AT&T reserve the line for its own
TV service and for data from other companies that pay a fee -- thereby
making AT&T the arbiter of content in your home?

At the moment, phone companies are cagey about their plans. What they will
say is they're not going to stop their customers from getting to any site or
service on the Internet. "Let me be clear: AT&T will not block anyone's
access to the public Internet, nor will we degrade anyone's quality of
service," Whitacre said in a speech to a trade conference in Las Vegas
recently. "Period. End of story." But just because AT&T won't block people
from accessing Google's videos doesn't mean it will give Google's videos the
same status on the broadband pipe as other content -- meaning that while
AT&T's TV service may come in at high-definition quality, those from
competing firms might only run at standard-definition.

Indeed, AT&T and other network operators are building their networks in a
way that would make it possible to split up network traffic into various
lanes -- fast, slow, medium -- and then to decide what kind of data, and
whose data, goes where, based on who's paid what. Broadband companies argue
that engineering their networks in this way will benefit customers in two
ways. First, they say, splitting up the Internet into several lanes will
generally improve its efficiency -- the network will simply run better if
it's more logically managed.

The phone companies' second argument concerns cost. If AT&T builds a
blindingly fast new Internet line to your house but only allows some firms
-- firms that pay -- to get the fastest service, it can significantly offset
the costs of the build-out. And that's good for you, AT&T says, because if
the company can charge the likes of Apple and Google to pay for the line, it
doesn't have to charge you. "I think what we're saying is friendly to the
consumer," Ciccone says. "If we're building the capacity, what we're doing
is trying to defray some of the cost from consumers to the business end of
this."

AT&T's critics don't buy this claim. They argue that by slicing up the
Internet into different lanes, broadband companies are violating one of the
basic network design principles responsible for the Internet's rise and
amazing success. They add, too, that there's no proof that AT&T's plan would
result in reduced broadband costs for home customers. Instead, consumers
could lose out in a big way. If AT&T's plan comes to pass, the dynamic
Internet, where innovation rules and where content companies rise and fall
on their own merit, would shrivel. By exploiting the weaknesses in current
laws, telecom firms would gain an extraordinarily lucrative stake in the new
media universe. In the same way that a corporation like Clear Channel
controls the radio airwaves, companies like AT&T could become kingmakers in
the online world, granting priority to content from which they stand to
profit most. Britney Spears, anyone?

To understand why critics worry about the future of the Internet in the
absence of what they call network neutrality, it helps to look at the
underlying philosophy of the ubiquitous network. Engineers are fond of
describing the Internet as a "dumb network," a designation that's meant to
be a compliment. Unlike other large communications systems -- phone or cable
networks -- the Internet was designed without a specific application in
mind. The engineers who built the network didn't really know what it would
be used for, so they kept it profoundly simple, making sure that the network
performed very few functions of its own. Where other networks use a kind of
"intelligence" to define what is and what isn't allowed on a system, the
various machines that make up the Internet don't usually examine or act upon
data; they just push it where it needs to go.

The smallest meaningful bit of information on the Internet is called a
"packet"; anything you send or receive on the network, from an e-mail to an
iTunes song, is composed of many packets. On the Internet, all packets are
equal. Any one packet hurtling over the pipe to my house is treated more or
less the same way as any other packet, regardless of where it comes from or
what kind of information -- video, voice or just text -- it represents. If I
were to download a large Microsoft Word e-mail attachment at the same time
that I were to stream a funny clip from Salon's Video Dog, the Internet
won't make any effort to give the video clip more space on my line than the
document, even if I may want it to. If the connection is too slow to
accommodate both files at the same time, my video might slow down and
sputter as the Word file hogs up the line -- to the network, bits are bits,
and a video is no more important than a Word file.

The notion that the Internet shouldn't perform special functions on network
data is known as the "end-to-end principle." The idea, first outlined by
computer scientists Jerome Saltzer, David Clark, and David Reed in 1984, is
widely seen as a key to the network's success. It is precisely because the
Internet doesn't have any intelligence of its own that it's been so useful
for so many different kinds of things; the network works consistently and
evenly for everyone, and, therefore, everyone is free to add their own brand
of intelligence to it.

Today's largest broadband firms, though, aren't accustomed to running dumb
networks built on the end-to-end principle. AT&T ran the phone network at
its own behest -- and the company usually benefited from it. Historically,
in the telecom industry, "there's been this instinct toward control," says
Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and a co-author of "Who Controls the
Internet?" At firms like AT&T and Verizon, both of which have roots in the
monopolistic old AT&T, there's now an effort afoot to reengineer parts of
the Internet by introducing more intelligence to manage and control data.

One firm that has been a vocal proponent of prioritizing data is Cisco, the
giant network equipment company whose products currently power much of the
Internet. "We think that as people use their broadband connections more
intensively, the need to manage traffic is going to increase," says Jeff
Campbell, director of government affairs at Cisco. The company has designed
an array of products that allows service providers like AT&T and Verizon to
scrutinize everything on their networks extremely closely. One Cisco
brochure (PDF) touts a system called the Cisco Service Control Engine, which
is described as "a deep packet inspection engine that helps enable service
providers to identify, classify, monitor, and control traffic" on the
network. "Deep packet inspection" refers to the practice of looking at each
slice of data on the network and determining exactly what kind of
information it is -- whether it's part of an e-mail message, or a bit of a
video file you're trading over Bittorrent, or perhaps a New York Times news
story on the Web.

After examining each packet and deciding which user asked for it, where it's
coming from, and what application it's meant for, the Cisco system allows
network operators to assign various network privileges to the data. During a
time of network congestion, data that is "delay-sensitive" -- like part of a
voice phone call or a streaming video -- can be moved along the network in a
hurry, while packets that represent less urgent data -- peer-to-peer file
transfers, or downloads of e-mail attachments -- might be put on a slow
lane. In this sort of network, were I to download a video file and a Word
file at the same time, the network would notice it, and may decide to slow
down the Word file so that the video file plays smoothly.

Many Web entrepreneurs and network policy experts think that giving priority
to some traffic is good for the Internet. In February, Mark Cuban, the
billionaire media entrepreneur and sports-team owner, posted a rant on his
blog decrying the current state of network traffic management, and calling
on broadband firms to offer high-speed service for some kinds of data.
"There are some basic facts about the Internet that remind me of driving on
the 405 in Los Angeles," Cuban wrote. "Traffic jams happen. There is no end
in sight for those traffic jams. The traffic jams are worse at certain times
of the day. Whether it's the 405 or the Internet." If we use carpool lanes
to allow some cars to bypass traffic on our freeways, Cuban asked, why not
add HOV lanes to the Internet, so that media that needs fast service can get
to its destination more quickly?

Cuban is a co-founder of HDNet, a high-definition cable and satellite TV
network, and has a particular interest in seeing the Internet give special
treatment to certain files. In fact, the new Internet schemes are
specifically designed to boost audio and video on the network. If your Word
file slows down for a half-second during download, you're not going to
notice it; but if your Internet phone call has a half-second interruption,
it would annoy you to no end.

Opponents of neutrality regulations say other applications currently being
designed for the Internet will only work well if the network is improved.
For instance, imagine if you were watching an Internet TV broadcast of a
basketball game that allowed you to switch to different camera angles during
the game. That program would be only useful, says Campbell of Cisco, if the
camera angles appeared instantly, not seconds after you switched. Other
advocates point to new medical diagnostic devices with which hospitals can
monitor the status of patients at home; in that situation, it would seem
obvious to give such traffic priority.

"I guess we could leave the Internet in the dark ages and leave everything
as an unprioritized, unorganized mass where all bits are treated the same,"
says Campbell. "But we think good network management technology will improve
overall performance and consumers will have a better experience in the long
term."

Despite Cisco's position, there is fractious division among network
engineers on whether prioritizing certain time-sensitive traffic would
actually improve network performance. Introducing intelligence into the
Internet also introduces complexity, and that can reduce how well the
network works. Indeed, one of the main reasons scientists first espoused the
end-to-end principle is to make networks efficient; it seemed obvious that
analyzing each packet that passes over the Internet would add some
computational demands to the system.

Gary Bachula, vice president for external affairs of Internet2, a nonprofit
project by universities and corporations to build an extremely fast and
large network, argues that managing online traffic just doesn't work very
well. At the February Senate hearing, he testified that when Internet2 began
setting up its large network, called Abilene, "our engineers started with
the assumption that we should find technical ways of prioritizing certain
kinds of bits, such as streaming video, or video conferencing, in order to
assure that they arrive without delay. As it developed, though, all of our
research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far
more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth. With enough bandwidth
in the network, there is no congestion and video bits do not need
preferential treatment."

Today, Bachula continued, "our Abilene network does not give preferential
treatment to anyone's bits, but our users routinely experiment with
streaming HDTV, hold thousands of high-quality two-way videoconferences
simultaneously, and transfer huge files of scientific data around the globe
without loss of packets."

Not only is adding intelligence to a network not very useful, Bachula
pointed out, it's not very cheap. A system that splits data into various
lanes of traffic requires expensive equipment, both within the network and
at people's homes. Right now, broadband companies are spending a great deal
on things like set-top boxes, phone routers and other equipment for their
advanced services. "Simple is cheaper," Bachula said. "Complex is costly" --
a cost that may well be passed on to customers.

Expensive as they may be, the new network schemes will allow for myriad
moneymaking opportunities. The new technology will allow AT&T and company to
reserve the fast lane for the highest bidders. And AT&T says such a plan is
perfectly fair. "It costs a lot to maintain and operate a network," says
Ciccone of AT&T. "You don't pay for that by offering a raw pipe. We didn't
build a copper line network a hundred years ago so people could do whatever
they want on it. We offered a phone service. And you don't build networks so
that somebody else can necessarily use them for free. We have the capability
through dedicated lines of service for offering a high-quality product.
There's a service there. We should be able to offer that in the market."

Ciccone is particularly galled by the fact that those who are the most
opposed to AT&T's plans are enormous firms -- such as Google -- that want to
make money by offering video services online. "This really is just coming
from a couple companies who have plans to stream movies," he says. "They
hide behind the guise of the innovator in the garage who's building the next
big Google. That's a lot of hooey because the little guy is not streaming
movies. This is about the companies that want to stream movies, and they
want to not just compete with us but with cable companies in doing so. What
disturbs them is that we're building network capacity to be able to
accommodate ourselves with a very high-quality product, and the Googles
won't be able to deliver the same quality."

Technology companies do say they fear AT&T's network won't provide a level
playing field, and that AT&T's competitors won't be able to deliver videos
that work as well as AT&T's content. Networks have finite space, and it is a
fact of network engineering that when some data is given a priority on the
network, other data will be pushed aside. At the Senate hearing, Stanford
Law professor and Internet policy expert Lawrence Lessig argued that this
will put companies or individuals that can't pay for high-quality service at
an enormous disadvantage, "reducing application or content competition on
the Internet." In the past year, streaming-video Web sites have proliferated
on the Internet, and some of the most popular services have come from
start-ups like YouTube. Under AT&T's plan, flush firms like Google would be
able to pay for all the space on the line, leaving the smaller guys out of
luck. The Internet has long been a meritocracy, where smart and creative
companies can act quickly and beat out established players. That wouldn't be
so on AT&T's Internet.

Broadband operators respond by declaring they will offer high-speed services
to all companies, big or small, and anybody will be able to pay for a spot
in the fast lane. "Generally companies shy away from doing exclusive deals,"
says AT&T's Ciccone. "You don't say I'm only going to provide telephone
service to only one bank." But as Amazon's Misener points out, "This is a
zero-sum game. If you prioritize anyone's content you necessarily degrade
someone else's. That's how it works." When you convert one lane on a freeway
into a toll lane, it's true that you make traffic better for cars that can
pay. But you also make traffic worse for cars that cannot.

Indeed, that's what makes AT&T's plan so lucrative. The company can't offer
fast service to everyone. If it did offer all companies access to the fast
lane for a low fee, the lane would soon become congested and nobody would
have an incentive to pay. To make the most money, the network operators may
charge just a few firms huge sums to ride on the pipe. This means that one
or two companies could lock in a preferred position on the network.

And AT&T's own services could benefit greatly from the new plan. For
instance, AT&T offers a voice-over-the-Internet phone plan called
CallVantage that competes with Skype, a free service owned by eBay. "Let's
say there's a certain amount of revenue in voice services, maybe $125
billion in voice," explains Wu. If AT&T determines that letting Skype onto
the fast lane will cause it to lose customers and, thus, revenue, it could
decide to only let Skype ride the slow lanes. "If you're going to lose $10
billion to Skype by letting them on, why give them that money?" Wu says that
under current regulations, this practice would be perfectly legal.

While such deals may be legal, AT&T says, they would be bad for business. If
a broadband company didn't allow a popular service like Skype a spot in the
fast lane, consumers would choose a different provider. "If you do make dumb
decisions, your customers go somewhere else," Ciccone says. "Nobody wants to
offer half a service with only special deals or arrangements for something
of that nature. You're competing against other companies that may do it
differently."

But if you don't like your Internet provider, would you really be able to go
elsewhere? Cerf, who is now Google's chief Internet "evangelist," pointed
out in the Senate hearing that only 53 percent of Americans now have a
choice between cable modem and DSL high-speed Internet service at home.
According to the FCC, 28 percent of Americans have only one of these options
for broadband Internet access, and 19 percent have no option at all.

Moreover, phone and cable companies have been trying to reduce competition
in the broadband business even further. They convinced the FCC to allow them
to prohibit rival Internet service providers -- such as Earthlink -- from
offering high-speed net access on phone- and cable-company-owned lines.
(Phone and cable companies do lease their lines to independent ISPs like
Earthlink, but under current rules they can decline to do so at any time.)
AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have also pushed hard to stop cities across the
country from launching free or low-cost municipal wireless Internet systems.

In this marketplace, if your DSL or cable modem provider begins to favor
some content over others, you will have very little recourse. Even if you
could choose another provider, doing so isn't easy. "It's not like there are
two supermarkets in town and if you don't like one you can go to the other,"
Amazon's Misener says. He adds that "every economic theory we know suggests
that when there's a duopoly" -- in this case between cable broadband and
phone broadband -- "there will be tacit collusion in the market." So even if
you could choose between broadband or cable service, eventually, like radio
stations in any metro area, you will find they all sound the same. Or think
about your cable lineup. When your provider doesn't carry the TV network you
like, what choice do you have? Almost none.

At the moment, there are very few regulations that outline what broadband
companies can and cannot do with content on their lines. So far, the FCC has
only been willing to outline some principles to which firms should adhere.
In a speech in Boulder, Colo., in February 2004, Michael Powell, the former
FCC head, said that he didn't see the need for regulation. Instead, he set
out a list of "Internet freedoms" that he "challenged the broadband network
industry to preserve." Specifically, Powell called on high-speed network
providers to allow their customers to access any legal content on the
Internet, use any legal applications, and plug in any devices to their
networks. The FCC later outlined these principles in a "policy statement,"
and imposed these conditions on Verizon and AT&T as temporary conditions of
the mergers the companies underwent last year.

But while these "freedoms" allow customers access to any services, they
don't outline whether AT&T can give some content priority on the network. In
addition, there is a debate about whether Powell's "challenge" is
enforceable at all. Last year, when one small North Carolina ISP began
blocking Internet voice calls on its network, the FCC quickly stepped in and
fined the firm. Telecom firms say the incident proves that the FCC has
enough authority to block egregious behavior. But AT&T's Ciccone also
acknowledges that adhering to the FCC's vision is a "voluntary commitment.
It's not a rule or a regulation of the FCC. They laid out the broadband
principles and our compliance is purely a voluntary act on our part."

Wu explains the issue this way: "Right now it's like the ghost of Michael
Powell has his finger in the dike" protecting us against the worst behavior
of big companies. But if you were starting a new service on the Internet,
"do you want to bet your business on the ghost of Michael Powell?"

Today, as numerous proposals for reforming telecom law float around
Congress, broadband firms are fighting hard against a neutral network, and
apparently winning. (AT&T may certainly be on the government's good side, as
it has been secretly allowing the National Security Agency to monitor its
phone and Internet lines, according to a retired AT&T technician, as
reported by Wired News.) In a party-line vote last week, Republicans on a
House subcommittee defeated one neutrality proposal. According to many
observers, another bill in the Senate, offered by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden
of Oregon, faces similar dim prospects. In addition to lobbying, broadband
firms have launched a campaign aimed at urging Americans to join their
fight. Large telecom firms back a "coalition" called Hands Off the Internet,
which argues that instituting network neutrality amounts to government
"regulation" of the Internet. On its Web site, the group -- which is funded
by, among other companies, AT&T, and is headed by former Bill Clinton press
secretary Mike McCurry -- beseeches, "Join us and say NO to government
regulation of the Internet!"

Opponents say that regulation is the only way to save the Internet from the
likes of AT&T. "They would have the pipe split between the public Internet
-- which might get 1 Mbps speeds -- and a toll lane on the rest of the 100
Mbps pipe they're laying," Tod Cohen, the director of government affairs at
eBay, says of the AT&T's plans. By "public Internet," Cohen is referring to
today's Internet, the Internet of Google, Blogger, Skype, YouTube and
Flickr, services that came out of nowhere and are now indispensable.
"They're saying, 'We'll leave the public Internet to be like the
public-access station. But if you want to be on one of the fast channels,
you have to pay.'"

Consumer advocate Chester sees a dark future for the Internet if big
companies like AT&T gain unregulated control. "I think the public requires a 
serious national debate about what this means and what it's going to look 
like," he says. "There's a basic assumption that the Internet is going to 
remain forever open and diverse and affordable. I'm saying we should be 
cautious. We should really understand what these proposals mean for the kind 
of diverse voices we would want to see online."

-- By Farhad Manjoo