Companies Win, Consumers Lose in McCain's Tech Plan

John McCain's tech plan it finally out, although not obviously so. Tech isn't listed as an "issue" under his home page issue list, nor is the plan found under the news or press release sections. It's buried here.

John McCain's Internet is a strange and wondrous world, not like the Internet most people experience. It's a place not for innovation and creativity, but one to be controlled by the telephone and cable companies. McCain's view of the Internet is an Internet is largely infiltrated by pirates and filled with dangers that require government protections and enforcement. His policy is filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. That's not surprising, considering that he took a variety of policy positions on the crucial question whether his friends in the telecom business should have been given immunity for spying on Americans. At different times, he supported and questioned it, then skipped the crucial vote entirely. He was not alone in doing this, but it takes on added significance when combined with this policy plan.

As we expected, it's the product of a team of advisors that gives lip service to consumers, but when the rubber meets the road, it's the corporations that get most of the goodies. Somewhat like the McCain campaign more generally, it also contains some internal contradictions that muddy the waters that make this look like the product of a group that was trying very hard to make some attempts to appear consumer-friendly, when it's mostly corporate-friendly.

For example, there's this headline in the plan: "John McCain Has Fought to Keep the Internet Free From Government Regulation." A little further on down, there's this sub-head: "When Regulation Is Warranted, John McCain Acts." So some regulation is fine, but some is not. And therein is the key to McCain's philosophy of the Internet, such as it is, particularly when combined with a separate part of McCain's platform, on privacy and security. The philosophy is that business can do what it wants to control what happens online, but consumers are on their own.

McCain's "innovation" platform sets out four principles that his chief advisor, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell, put forward as guidelines when he headed the agency. Consumers have the rights to access services and content, attach equipment and have a choice of service providers. When Powell was chairman, he never bothered actually to enforce any of those. He wanted them simply to be advisory. It was left to his successor, current Chairman Kevin Martin, acting with two current Democratic commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, to make those principles stick by acting against Comcast, which throttled consumer traffic and then lied about it.

Here's the biggest internal contradiction: "John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like 'net-neutrality,' but rather he believes that an open marketplace with a variety of consumer choices is the best deterrent against unfair practices." Over the last 70 years, consumers were protected by law from telephone companies discriminating in the carriage of their calls and messages. Powell's FCC lifted those protections for the Internet. Restoring a well-established consumer-protection principle is hardly a new or unique concept, except for the telephone and cable companies, which want unfettered access to everything the consumers put online. Net Neutrality is not prescriptive regulation. It's consumer protection, the kind of thing McCain says elsewhere he likes.

The McCain/Powell construct also deprives consumers of true choice and prevents the "open marketplace." It's all well and good to say that consumers have a choice of providers, but if the choice is two, then that's not much. Thanks to Powell's FCC, that's exactly where most Americans are now: cable or telco are the only viable choices. The wireless services, cell and satellite, are slow and expensive by comparison.

McCain's plan would do little to improve the ability for consumers to have more choice, nor for new Internet Service Providers to start up. There is a sop to municipalities which want to try to fill in where the private sector hasn't found it profitable to go, but McCain's phone company allies have done all they can to stop those projects from getting off the ground. They are a last resort, and many areas can't afford it. True competition exists when new ISPs can start up, lease facilities from the telephone and cable companies, and improve on what consumers can get now. That won't happen under the McCain/Powell plan.

One big question is how far McCain would be willing to let his phone and cable company allies go in invading the privacy of consumers. Another part of his tech platform talks about protecting "the creative industries from piracy." There's nothing in here about consumer rights, but the industries will be protected, mind you. But in another, more prominently displayed section, McCain has proposed a plan to ensure "the personal security and privacy of Americans in the digital age."

"We must all feel confident that today's technologies can be used safely, securely, and in a way that protects our privacy," McCain says. There's the strong possibility this nicely phrased sentiment will conflict with McCain's intellectual property protection pledge. His allies in the telecom world, notably AT&T, want the right to search every packet of data every consumer sends online, looking for copyrighted content. They have talked about it for months. It's a clear invasion of privacy, and ignores that consumers have rights to use copyrighted content in certain ways without permission of the creator. It's called "fair use," and is a well-established principle.

Finally, McCain purports to be in favor of a "connected nation" with the benefits of the Internet available to all. Unless, of course, that connectivity interferes with some other policy goal of his. McCain was the chief proponent of cutting off Internet support funds to schools and libraries which didn't use his prescribed methods of filtering the content students and others see.

His solution to bringing broadband to more people is to adopt a variation of the program that couldn't get off the ground in the Kentucky legislature earlier this year when backed by the telephone companies - more tax breaks for big business to do what they should be doing anyway in serving underserved areas.

A McCain-appointed FCC that follows this program will only continue in the direction this country has been heading for the last seven years - down. As the telephone and cable companies get more and more control, our ranking in Internet connectivity continue to drop relative to the rest of the world.

But those companies responsible for the trend get all the goodies, from tax breaks to control over the Internet, while consumers are left with mostly empty promises -- except for the sinister ones that would surely be carried out in a McCain Administration.

Comments

[Sciguy]

I live in rural Kentucky, and although cable or telco are the only viable choices for folks living in cities, they don't even exist here. No cable TV. No telco. Cell phones don't work out here. Our telephone lines are copper, fer cryin' out loud- no fiber here! We have 3 satellite dishes - one for C-band, one for Dish Network, and a third for my Internet connection (I'm thinking of renaming our farm "Dishes R Us") . To me, the whopping $70 per month I have to pay to get better than dialup is a small miracle - at least I can now download pictures and videos and mpegs and the like.

You were spot on in taking McCain - and the Kentucky lege - to task. I live in one of those underserved areas, but the last time I had to get AT&T phone service because both of my phone lines had quit working, it took 5 days before someone arrived. In the meantime, I tried to put in a service request online. All nice and modern, right? Well, it turned out that I had to get an online code in order to make the online service request. How was I going to get this code? They were going to call me! And this is the company that McCain wants to put in charge of broadband connections?

[Thad]

What about Obama?

I still haven't forgiven Clinton for the DMCA.

[serena1313]

What's disturbing about McCain is his lack of understanding technology's fundamental basics of the internet, how it operates and its importance for advancing minds and entrepreneurship. He just learned how to log on and is still learning how to use email.

McCain's close relationship to lobbyists takes priority over all else. An article in CQ today mentioned McCain is bothered only by lobbyists who don't share his goals. So that in and of itself is worrisome and troubling. But it is also telling what McCain's real goals are -- in other words research each lobbyist he surrounds himself with. Therein lies the key to what McCain's "vision" of where he will take the country.

Furthermore in 1996 McCain wanted to go much further in deregulating the telecom bill that no other Senator was willing to go.

Also note too a couple months ago he said he believed he had the right as the President to spy on anyone he chose to without a warrant. So that answers whether he would respect the privacy of Americans: he won't.

If McCain had his druthers companies would be completely deregulated.

Not one of McCain's policies take into account the best interest of people. The CEO pretending to be president for the past 8 years gave away tax breaks and deregulation to mega-corporations. McCain wants to give them tens of billions more and says so constantly. While Bush and McCain rail against citizen "entitlement" programmes they've turned America into a corporate welfare nation.

[WritusMaximus]

Obama should run with this. Tech-deficient McSame has the gall to propose a plan that curtails choice, increases prices, and gives subsidies to ultra-rich companies that obviously don't need them. These subsidies could be put to better use in health care, housing, infrastructure, etc.

[Marksalot]

This goes to the heart of what Obama needs to do to exploit McCains biggest weakness, which is his poor judgement, in spite of his experience. Point to who McCain has surrounded himself with as advisors and talk about the policies these people have implemented and advocate.

Michael Powell, the media advisor, who refused to listen to the public's overwhelming protests over further media consolidation, when Chairman of the FCC.

Phil Graham, the economic advisor, who made the Enron debacle and the current price of oil possible, while still a Senator.

Randy Scheunemann, McCain's foreign policy advisor, who recently got paid as a lobbyist to represent the country of Georgia.

They're just for starters. If more Americans knew about the advice McCain is open to receiving, and from whom, they'd see him in a much different light.

Obama needs to work this angle.

[Snowball]

McCain's argument against net neutrality is a red herring. The issue is not about the capitalist marketplace, but the marketplace of ideas. It's a proven fact that when corporations control the avenues of communication, the marketplace of ideas shrinks as corporations conglomerate and force competition out of the marketplace. The consumer's access to a broad variety of ideas on the internet is best protected by government regulation insuring that the medium remains accessible to all content providers and cannot be monopolized by a few giant corporate interests. To allow internet providers to discriminate against producers of content based on their ability to pay for bandwidth can only lead to fewer independent voices and less diversity on the web. This is the real agenda of the corporations, to block out content that does not fit with their political perspective and economic interests.

[ESaD]

My plan is the simplest:
The US could restructure it's debt to China by say, swapping for a Gulf Coast State. However many $billion/trillion$ we owe in exchange for Texas would be fine with me.

[Shiba Inu149]

Typical of the republicans, give breaks to big business and they will take care of the rest of us. We've been getting urinated on (tried to use an acceptalbe word) for the past 7 1/2 years and it hasn't felt very good. There's a better way.

[GrainOSand]

Trickle down suggests urination. The genius in phrasing it that way was that it afforded an overt or open method to say the aim is to pis on the electorate and have the electorate feel good about it afterwards such that it votes against its logical interest and continues to through that HabiTrail maze or go nowhere on that HabiTrail wheel of trying to get ahead. Seven and a half years of trickle down, no, much longer than that, for the disease of America pee" d upon by the rich, powerful, immoral and corrupt has had a long incubation period. Many are just now starting to see lesions and boils on the surface from the chronic yet heretofore latent (through distraction, distortion, and division) disease, where others have remained keenly aware since the earliest days of existence, that something is not quite right.

[GrainOSand]

One marvels whenever America attempts to say that an abstraction of something is somehow different from the thing it abstracts. It may look different but it is in fact the same thing. The internet is life functions and activities in a box. An interface is available for a user to access goods, services, information, and other people for the cost of the interface and the connection to the marketplace, meeting place, or gathering place for ideas exchange and discussion. The internet is the streets, the roads, and the legal structure concerning traversing the streets and roads in terms of how fast, how far or where to, and general availability as represented in hardware and software protocol. The market is all the rest. The market is even part of maintaining the internet in that there is product involved in that endeavor.

All of the above is true concerning what the internet abstracts which is everyday life. If we are lawful outside the box, we will be lawful inside of its virtual environment and the converse is true. If government says you are on your own and business interests are more important outside the box then the same will be true inside the box. Thus, the quote below from the article should come as no surprise.


The philosophy is that business can do what it wants to control what happens online, but consumers are on their own.

[ESaD]

Things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

[GrainOSand]

Thus we get X=2 or simply, 2.

[ParaplegicNomad]

Your first paragraph is false; your premise is too generalized. It's only true if the abstraction maintains the commonality you wish to examine without sloughing off (abstracting away) important mitigating factors.

The internet has many things in common with life, but it is not a perfect abstraction of life. One important mitigating factor that you've abstracted away: you can't be punched in the face over the internet. This alone leads to behavioral differences. Here's another, more relevant example: it is far easier to organize people en masse over the internet than it is in the physical world. When we (the people) and they (the government) realize this and utilize it properly, the people en masse can generate a voice - and, more importantly, money - to rival what the large corporations can offer. See: Obama's fundraising during the primary.

Anyway, I agree with your last two sentences, but your logic that lead to the conclusion is badly flawed.

[GrainOSand]

For some reason I was moved to go back and look at old postings. I am glad that I did.

"but it is not a perfect abstraction of life."

Where did I say this?

"One important mitigating factor that you've abstracted away: you can't be punched in the face over the internet."

Where did I suggest this but I will suggest it now. I cannot physically reach out and touch someone instantaneously using my keyboard, but I can start a chain of events that results in a sucker punch. Would you care to experiment?

I was not seeking to say that the internet is exactly life in the box. I was saying that certain life functions like, paying bills, sending letters, having a conversation, reading a book, and executing financial transactions have been put inside the box. It also seems that ego has been put inside the box as well.

I am pleased that you agree with some aspect of my poorly formed logic, now life is truly complete. You will probably not see this posting but if you do, please try and read it free of predisposition to being authoritative and with an eye that others may have some clue about the world you have mastered.

Love and peace beyond platitude.