What a Tangled Web They Weave Over Open Access
There are people who, when you say “Internet,” will respond with great gushers of buzzwords, their hearts thumpety-thumping with joy. And then there are people who just long for the day when the Web is one more ordinary mystery to take for granted, like lights or running water or Cher infomercials. No more little icons, downloading, downloading. Just: Turn it on, turn it off.
If you’re one of these latter types--let’s call them “ordinary people”--you probably scanned past the news of the national Internet battle that touched down last month in Los Angeles. Re-scan, neighbor. A big deal is being clouded by great gushers of buzzwords. The good news is, the Internet is finally about to turn into something ordinary people could take for granted. The bad news: The particulars are being decided, not by anyone who gives a good dot-com about ordinary people, but by an army of corporate lobbyists.
The issue here is something called high-speed Internet access. It is, at the risk of thumpety-thumping, a truly exciting thing. A fast lane to the Internet, it transmits data about a hundred times faster than the fastest modem. The upshot is what tech enthusiasts have preached for years now: Piped-in movies. Five million TV channels on your computer. Video-phoning. The ability to flip from Amazon.com to, well, this column, as fast as you can turn a page.
The catch is, the most developed conduit for high speed now is the cable TV system, which is regulated by the federal and city governments. And AT&T;, the company most prepared to expand high-speed access beyond the 100,000 or so Angelenos who now have it, wants to monopolize its customers’ route to the Internet.
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This is where the issues get so complex that, if you aren’t a tech company or a lobbyist, the ordinary tendency is to tune out. Basically, there are several cable companies serving L.A. But AT&T--which; owns one of them--has a leg up because it recently acquired cable lines to about a third of the homes in the nation. Additionally, it controls one company (possibly two, pending approval) that ushers people online.
AT&T; says: We’ll upgrade our cable infrastructure to give high speed to the masses. But to recoup the investment, we need our customers to get online only via our Internet companies. This has roiled competing “Internet service providers,” such as America Online, whose subscribers mostly get to the Internet via slower phone lines. AOL stands to be aced out by AT&T;’s subsidiaries if it can’t persuade cities to force AT&T; to lease out space on the cables. “Open access” is the battle cry.
The fight, which has tripped from city to city, with stops at the federal level, is being waged now at Los Angeles City Hall. Many buzzwords. Much intrigue: Three of Mayor Richard Riordan’s appointees quit, ostensibly because the mayor liked AT&T.; Headlines implied they were martyrs to open access, but the key quitter has some sour history with the mayor’s people, and it’s the rare grand public exit that’s truly and solely on “principle.”
More broadly, though, the hype--who doesn’t like “openness” and “access”?--seems to have shed more heat than light. The greatest good for the most people isn’t as clear as you’d think here, and the ordinary “competition good/monopoly bad” framework doesn’t entirely work.
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For example, whom would “open access” actually benefit? Not the computer-less. How hard do we want to fight for the right of well-off PC owners to shop around for free e-mail? Wouldn’t the biggest gain go to Net giants like AOL?
And for consumers who just want to fuss less with their computers, wouldn’t the greatest good be to just get this high-speed Internet thing off the ground? Anyone who thinks it’ll get built with the court fights that have accompanied open access need look no further than Portland, Ore. That city forced AT&T; to open its cables to competing Net firms, and now AT&T; refuses to bring high speed to Portland at all.
Of course, L.A. isn’t Portland. It’s unlikely AT&T; would take its ball and go home in a market this big. But mightn’t a city have a lot of bargaining power if a monopoly--buzzword or not--could be dangled? What if free high-speed service in schools and libraries and senior centers was, say, a condition of AT&T;’s cable franchise? How’s that for open and accessible?
And what about the fat cable franchise fees and higher taxes L.A. collects now from AT&T;, which we would have to stop charging if the cables were opened and AT&T; were turned into a common carrier? What if the greatest good, financial and social, were to be found in the baddest buzzword? Extraordinary, no?
Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.
