Do you buy food? How would you like it if the Department of Agriculture required you to buy bean curd and steak, cheese wiz and caviar, as well as liquor and green tea so you wouldn't be denied the "full grocery experience?"
Do you drive? How would you like it if the Department of Transportation required you to buy an Escalade and banned bicycles, buses and carpools, so you wouldn't miss out on the "full transportation experience?"
Do you live in an apartment? How would you like it if the Department of Housing and Urban Development banned the sale of anything other than single family homes with a fenced-in yard so that everyone would get a "full housing experience?"
Do you subscribe to cable television? How would you like it if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) insisted that you pay for every premium channel, including the adult channels, so that you (and your kids) would have the "full television experience?"
Now consider this:
Do you have a cell phone? How would you like it if the FCC required you to pay an extra $20 a month to get movie downloads, whether you want them not, or to allow your kids to access violent video games or adult content, whether you want them to or not, just so everyone would get what the government considers to be "the full Internet experience?" What if you're low income, and you'd rather spend that $20 on books? Or warm clothes? Or food?
My friend Malkia Cyril of the Center for Media Justice doesn't want low income people to have that choice. She says it's "un-American to give low-income communities substandard Internet service that creates barriers to economic opportunity and democratic engagement."
So what is this "un-American" consumer offering?
One of the wireless carriers is offering three packages, all of VOIP-enabled (so they can get services like Skype) with free access to any lawful website, and all of them clearly labeled:
• Plan A: $40, with no multimedia streaming (that is, no movie downloads such as Netflix, porn, etc.)
• Plan B: $50, with metered multimedia streaming.
• Plan C: $60, with unlimited multimedia streaming.
Could you decide which of these three packages meets your needs?
Or is all this just too confusing? Cyril thinks so.
She writes that Plan A "will confuse low-income consumers" into buying this carrier's cell phones because they won't be able to figure out that "if you want the WHOLE Internet, you just have to pay more."
Well, actually you don't have to pay more. The most expensive option -- Plan C -- costs $40 less than the least expensive offering of any of the other carriers. And if you later discover you don't like Plan A, you can upgrade to Plan B or Plan C with no penalty, or you can pay the $100 it would cost to get service similar to Plan C from competing carriers. And you can do that immediately, since none of these plans has an early termination fee. What's wrong with paying less for the particular services you want?
Cyril is making a common mistake among us lefties when it comes to low income people -- she is being paternalistic. Those poor poor people. They can't think for themselves, so the government has to make decisions for them. In this case, Cyril argues, the FCC should outlaw Plan A (and maybe Plan B) and require every carrier to offer only full-menu service like Plan C. All this in the name of "net neutrality."
If I've learned anything from my 45 years working with low income folks, it's this: they're intelligent and they're resourceful. They have to be in order to survive. They don't appreciate condescension or sloganeering in their name. And they have sense enough to know whether they'd rather use an extra $20 a month for movie downloads or for movie tickets -- and would rather get discounts for services they do not want or need.
Affordability is a huge barrier keeping minorities and low income people offline. This week, the Pew Hispanic Center released a report that found that 85 percent of whites have cell phones -- compared to 79 percent of African Americans and 76 percent of Latinos. Barely half -- only 58% -- of those earning less than $30,000 a year have cell phones.
Access to cell phones is part of a huge digital divide. Bridging it will take more than big adjectives and name-calling. It will take companies who see low income people as respected customers who can make good decisions -- not, as Cyril portrays them, "confused" ignoramuses who need the FCC to make decisions for them.
Not that there's no role for the FCC. It needs to prevent carriers from blocking lawful content. It needs to promote transparency. It needs to foster competition, innovation and job creation. And as MMTC has pointed out time and again, the FCC sure as hell needs to do much more to promote minority and women business ownership and equal employment opportunities in broadband.
What the FCC doesn't need to do is increase costs for those who can least afford it. As long as there's full transparency, low income people ought to be able to choose Plan A, B or C. Low income people -- the underserved -- don't need the FCC to decide, for them, how they can spend their money.
David Honig is the co-founder of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and preserving equal opportunity and civil rights in the mass media, telecommunications and broadband industries, and closing the digital divide.
lff
If you'd bother to have discussions with real people, outside comment sections, you'd find the "other guys" generally like to actually discuss ideas rather than what they think "your side" is like. And they're rarely paternalistic.
I've met Cyril and I know that not only has she come up from a low income background, she has remained true to those roots and has fought make the world more conscious and more kind. There aren't many in the world who transcend poverty and remain in connection to that reality. As a woman from a working poor rural background, I never once felt belittled or diminished by Cyril.
In contrast, this article by Honig is completely belittling. First of all, academic and media circles are all too entitled to speak about the poor in the third person. Are you assuming that none of us read HP?
Honig bashes a woman who has first hand experience with economic struggle. She should be allowed to speak for us, yes. But Honig, with indirect experience, should not.
FYI, Honig stating that he's "worked" with us in order too buffer his argument only rubs salt in the wound.
Tiered service IS a confusing subject, deliberately so, and it's clearly one that Honig doesn't understand or is pretending not to understand, no doubt due to some other interest. This distortion of issues by Honig makes me wonder if I'm reading the HP or watching Fox News.
Shame on you, HP.
"Tiered service IS a confusing subject, deliberately so..." Poor does not necessarily mean ignorant but for those that don't understand there is plenty of free assistance available.
lff
Most of the studies I have read conclude tiered pricing is a good thing.
When it comes to having to choose between no access (because too expensive) or getting access without the bells and whistles, wouldn't most people pick the option where they
could get online? I don't know that many companies are giving the service away for free, so without tiered pricing or government intervention in the market (and do we really want that on the heels of Egypt?), what are our other options?
I look forward to your response.
"If I've learned anything from my 45 years working with low income folks, it's this: they're intelligent and they're resourceful."-With all due respect (I mean that), this comment alone is a weak attempt to trying to say "I understand the working poor so you can trust my concern is with them." In NJ, we have a Governor who is pushing for something called "Opportunity Scholarship Act" which is all about "school choice" for 20,000 (give or take) children within five years and is cutting the education budget, massively Great, those kids have access but what of the others that stay behind, the GENERATION of kids, denied FULL access.
Eventually having less access is what keeps low income people in the poverty cycle deprived from the privileges that those with full access have. Not to mention, lack of computers and reliability on wireless only.
It is a 'nice' consumerist concept what MPCS is offering but it contradicts the basic Internet principle of interconnectivity.
What Honig does not seem to understand is that the Internet cannot and SHOULD NOT be treated and discussed as just any other commodity product of capitalism.
Kind of like universal healthcare. If doctors are forced to provide healthcare for a set cost, then they are forced into providing healthcare like slavery?
Remember this as well- if you believe that healthcare, the internet, education all are rights and that government needs to provide them, then remember that it is the government that gives you that right and that the government can then take that right away.
Cyril is stating that she believes that access to information and communications tools are human rights. Did Honig really need to write an entire article to misconstrue that simple idea? Most folks leave oversimplification and snide comments about people they disagree with to status updates and tweets these days, don't they?
Honig either needs to admit that he doesn't agree that the right to communicate is a basic human right and leave it at that, or try more logically to point us all toward this magical tiered-but-equal place he thinks we (who believe in and work for justice) cannot see yet.
The issue at hand, which is only a small part of a larger problem, is Metro phone users on lower cost plans will not be able to access certain sites not based on their rights but rather based completely on a corporation's drive to make more money. Which sites will be unavailable? Will customers be able to petition for a change if certain sites are blocked yet regarded as important/vital rather than simply popular?
Honig got one thing right, we "poor poor people." We have to fight him too, obviously.
Be careful with worlds like deserve and entitled and rights- they often have very dire unintended consequences.
Malkia Cyril believes that if you went to the doctor for an illness and the doctor sold you half the medicine you needed to get well and called it a promotion that you’d call the doctor crazy. Well if I take my son who weighs 40 pounds to the doctor for a headache and the doctor sells me a dose of pain medicine for a 200 pound man and says it’s the best available, I’m going to call him crazy and then I’m going to sue the doctor for malpractice.
Access is important, but so is freedom of choice especially at the risk of losing the roof over your head, food on the table and yes, even the ability to go to a doctor who will hopefully offer the right amount of medication suited for each individual.