Our comments on this issue will be part of the public record as long as records are kept. They form a body of knowledge that the many staff people working for the FCC and other interested parties could draw from.
Will the Commissioners themselves actually read any of our comments?
Who knows. Most likely staff will scan through all that they receive and pick something out here and there that catch their eyes. Summaries of that will probably be given to Commissioners. Probably it will get tallied statistically. So, it is a lottery.
I will probably excerpt some key ideas for a further submission later. But I thought that I would copy them into a diary here so that the discussion in this forum might have whatever benefit might be derived from them.
If something in this inspires you to something in your own comments, great. Repetition from as many people as possible is important.
Enjoy!
Chairman Wheeler and Commissioners
Federal Communications Commission
Comments Regarding open internet rules, net neutrality and common carriage.
In Central Texas, where I grew up, I was acquainted with people who had seen Lyndon Johnson campaigning for Congress out in the Hill country, standing tall on someone's overturned washtub, pointing to the wires overhead going to the cities, but not dropped down to provide service to farm families. A woman who had seen this as a child, told me that she used an old fashioned iron that you had to insert a hot coal into because she lived in a rural area without electricity, as a young married woman into the early 1950s.
Commom carriage was not an abstract concept in areas like the Texas Hill Country. The legacy of the FCC is hugely important and it should not be forgotten - least of all by the FCC. Common carriage regulation lifted many rural and small town Americans out of poverty and into the middle class and set the stage for unprecedented prosperity in the postwar economy. Electric power and telephone service were as crucial as highways, roads and bridges to that prosperity.
Internet access will be, in the 21st century, a major defining foundation to the landscape of America, at least as important as telephones and electric power in the 20th.
I have not heard much, in the comments from Commissioners, on the subject of citizenship.
Cable companies and telephone companies tend not to have any DNA for the subject of citizenship. The entire existence of these industries is based on consumers who pay for services, largely as entertainment. Citizenship is something entirely different. Perhaps you might see it as not relevant. But you should.
The founding fathers who framed the Constitution had it right, before any hint of technical infrastructure existed. Where did the First Amendment come from? We know our history but do we grasp the vital urgency that is immanent as our future is born?
It happens that I am helping to create an internet-based system for communication - a newsletter, a website and a database to support marketing for a grassroots political outreach effort, a local unit of the Democratic Party.
What I see is that this issue is not partisan in its essence. It is American.
In practical terms, local citizens are priced out of the marketplace of ideas that the founders hoped to establish and protect with the First Amendment. It costs money to print pieces and then to mail them out, and it costs even more to buy any kind of advertising. Thus, it is cost prohibitive to engage in citizenship at the local level.
And, what kind of communiction is advertising? It doesn't allow for very deep considerations of any kind. It reduces everything to quite minimal aphorisms and there is a limit on how many messages can be produced. In fact, our advertising context limits our ability for deliberation and we come to the process with a kind of cultural ADHD we are not aware of.
Do you as an FCC commissioner think that citizenship should be out of the reach of citizens? You have to ask yourself this, because this is at issue here.
In a world where media ownership is a function of billions of dollars and where advertising revenue has to support profit making for shareholders, there is no real room for citizenship as the founders knew it.
A centrally important point is that print media lacks a trait fundamental to the potential that the internet promises: interactive engagement in dialogue.
The internet has become very important precisely because a small group somewhere can put up a website for just a few bucks and operate a newsletter for the price of putting forth effort and imagination. A fair contest in the open marketplace of ideas is based on ability to use language and the skills of mind gained in American public schools. A developing literacy, which you can see year after year in school children, is the interactive literacy of internet-based language use and social interaction. That represents the future.
Citizenship. The ability to engage in a community and to resolve questions of fact and debate local public policy ideas. We can find these relationships locally or globally.
Citizenship is a process, not a product. We learn as we live and we apply facts we ascertain the relevance of over time and as we gain the wisdom to evaluate them. I have seen useful debates take years - even decades - because of the way issues are considered as human experience grows. Thus, interactions over time as well as in depth define real citizenship.
Citizenship is just not the same thing as consumerism. When our choices are limited to which channels to watch, we are slaves in Plato's cave and not free citizens whose experience in the world give rise to concerns that then can be discussed or argued with other citizens freely in today's context and over time, into the future.
This is critical stuff. It is the survival of America itself that is at stake.
As I listened to the FCC session on the open internet rulemaking, I sensed that you all live in a very different world from your fellow Americans. You are celebrities in the rarified atmosphere of Washington, D.C. You went to good schools and have an unusually good education. You don't know the lack of opportunity to express yourself as a citizen that most struggle with.
You perhaps cannot understand what importance people attach to the open internet regulated under a definition as a common carriage circumstance.
Nevertheless, it is life and death to the fundamentals of American citizenship as we look ahead to the 21st century.
Take a very long view. As a thought experiment, behold the earth below from geosynchronous orbit.
Think about the next 50 to 100 years. The internet is something unprecedented in human history and yet it derives from our very most ancient dreams. We developed language in the first place so we could share our minds and interact through ideas.
Given the entire human race as it is now, all 7 billion of us, spread across the globe, can we find a way to put the best minds among us online in a great deliberation that can help solve species wide and planet wide problems?
In 1830, the human population reached its first billion. In 1930, it reached its second. This population growth is at the root of almost all of our modern problems and to which we must somehow address ourselves. This is a potential crisis in the making that surely overshadows all other considerations. Can we not rise above our ordinary status and consider the long view for all mankind?
Out of language, we invented written literacy. That was a great step forward for mankind. Now we have what amounts to a prosthetic planet-wide capacity for deliberation, linking in real time the entire human population.
We are a long way from using the internet that way, although the prospect is perhaps not too far fetched for sometime in the future as we evolve more consciously, and continue to discover ways to deal with problem solving on a global scale.
The problem is to stretch our imaginations. Here we are in the year 2014. It is necessary to think of 100, perhaps 200 years into the future. Why?
You are sitting in a position as a founder of a society and a system that will create a future that will either enable the First Amendment to be relevant in the world of networked communications to come, or will render the First Amendment to be a quaint relic like quill feather pens.
This is not about shareholder profits. This is not about consumers.
What is at stake is nothing less than the continued existence of We The People and even of the future of the entire human ethos, given the ongoing struggle for intellectual freedom.
The FCC must designate internet infrastructure as having legal Common Carrier necessity under Title II of the 1934 Telecommunications Act.
The promise of invoking Title II on a case by case basis cannot be made to work, even under the best of intentions. Nothing really works that way. You cannot promise to be there 50 years from now. That is why we have regulatory structures that live on beyond the immediate lifespan of individuals involved. Where would we be if Thomas Jefferson's promise to personally see to it that the First Amendment would be protected was all we had?
The Open Internet, Net Nuetrality, The level playing field, without tiered "pay to play" rules of the road - these are essential to maintaining American society into the future.
Addendum: Personal background experience as it applies to the issue of open internet and First Amendment practice
My experience is not untypical. I graduated from college in 1974 and went out across the state of Texas to look into opportunities for getting into the field of journalism. I had only late in my college career figured out that this was what I should do. I inquired at various small newspapers. Whether in one part of the state or another, I was told the same thing. They would normally hire a cub reporter just out of college, but their finances were such that either they were not able to do any hiring, or they were about to announce bankruptcy. There was a wave of closing small and independent newspapers.
I published freelance journalism, and lived as a college student in order to practice this craft. Like others, I gravitated towards political campaigns because the media skill set is useful in that arena. I volunteered at first, and then found some opportunities in political consulting. I found others there who had once been aspiring journalists. Over time I couldn't help but notice that specialization in political advertising was eclipsing more and more of the function of jourmalism and that the economics were tilting the whole playing field away from citizenship and unsponsored communication. I was concernd about this by 1990, and thus, became immediately interested in the potential of the internet to push this trend back.
I have experienced the questions related to journalism, the literary tradition, public relations, community and political organizing, the alternative press, and for the past twenty years I have explored the internet as a medium of citizenship. I have also worked with my wife, a children's librarian, in early childhood literacy.
Most of the potential for making the concept of a free and open marketplace of ideas actually relevant to American society lays in the future. Most people, most citizens, are only beginning to get an idea. It is the children we must consider.
We learn how to use communications media such as email or websites or social media, as we learn language use in our early socialization. We learn not only how to communicate, but when to communicate, who to communiate with - and when not to.
I have observed that those who were young children in the 1990s, who had access to the new world wide web at home and school, now have a more intuitive grasp for internet communication than do those who were out of school and in the workplace at that time.
Each year, as progressive waves of chidren enter preschool and then first grade, graduate from high school, and then enter college, there is more development in the new literacy of interactivity. It is more natural, more collaborative each year.
This is how it is that ultimately, this issue is about citizenship in its greatest sense, a fulfillment of all the hopes of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment paid forward towards the potential evolution of civilization in the United States and for the human race as a whole, eventually rising to its conscious potential.
That vision (or more likely) that sense is what has inspired and fueled the efforts of millions of people who brought about the internet, and who continue to work in some way to fashion a bit of future for themselves and whatever community they can understand themselves to be part of.
This is about adding a new territory to the vision of Thomas Jefferson and the way a social design for a civilization that could live into the future was woven into the Constitution.
Let not this territory be essentially a slave territory, or a new way that human beings are denied their potential in a sort of feudalism of the mind. Common Carriage as fundamental law is an urgent necessity.
Stuart Heady
Camano Island, Wa