Civil Defense - a weblog by Joshua Breitbart

I’ve been hearing more and more calls for a progressive framework for fighting indecency. This task will be more challenging in an era of TV on the Internet.

The government-directed, censorship-based approach moves us away from our goal of community-defined media. And it won’t work to pretend like there is no such thing as offensive content.

A recent article in The New Yorker on the spate of shootings in front of the Emmis Communications office put the blame on hip hop. There are plenty of reasons to take the writer to task, as other bloggers have done; New Yorker authors are more at home among the Pashtun than African Americans. I bring it up to say that this blame-the-individual approach is exactly what we were trying to avoid when we put out the No Hate Radio call, but it’s exactly what we’ll get if we don’t connect bad corporate content with bad corporate ownership.

On the Australian “Big Brother” show, which is broadcast 24/7 on the Internet when not airing on television, two men sexually assaulted a woman on the show. One man reportedly held the woman down while the other man rubbed his groin in her face. Though the men were booted, it seems like this is only slightly further than the show normally goes.

This strikes me as another example of the corporate media using violent sexism to gain attention. The response from the conservative government there has been to call for the show’s removal from television, even though the incident was broadcast on the Internet.

As broadcasters increasingly use it to distribute video, the Internet may become a place of greater regulation, with more restrictions on content. Without a connection between content and ownership, the burden of meeting that regulation could quash user-generated and community-based content. (Despite the knee-jerk perception that large corporations always want to de-regulate, they often favor complex regulations as a barrier to entry when faced with small-time competitors.)

That sort of regulation is in fact being proposed in Europe right now. As part of the EU’s “TV without frontiers” directive, the European Commission has suggested it would standardize regulation across all media for TV and “TV-like services.” (Check out the directive [pdf] and the accompanying press release. Read commentary with plenty of links from 463, which also tipped me off to the Aussie Big Brother brouhaha, and a summary from the free marketeers at the Progress and Freedom Foundation.)

In the US, the FCC already restricts the promotion of websites during children’s programming based on the commercial content of the sites (sales or advertising). That kind of direct connection between a broadcast TV show and web content makes sense to me, even if it’s not the kind of community accountability I would prefer.

However, it will get a lot more difficult to make that connection as the lines separating television and Internet and cell phones disappear. It’s one thing for the government to assert authority over your content if you’re using public airwaves or even rights of way; it’s another if you are just another video service provider on the Internet. (Remember, the open Internet is about having a level playing field among producers and disconnecting ownership of infrastructure from ownership of content.)

There is a wide open space on the other side of this technological revolution. That’s why we need to develop our own framework for content-regulation that meshes with our values and goals.

One approach that I know is wrong is combing air tapes for dirty words, which I recently learned the FCC has begun doing (thanks, Nan!). They’re going over sports broadcasts listening for curse words from enthusiastic fans. That’s just more random censorship.

It’s also a step towards ending live broadcasts. Interestingly, the EU directive seems to distinguish between “linear” and “non-linear” television, which could have the same effect. New regulations in Venezuela are also chilling live broadcasts. That’s not the future I want.

As`ad AbuKhalil made a very interesting point on Democracy Now on Monday:

I must say as somebody who studies the various political movements of the region, Hassan Nasrallah, five months ago, gave a speech and he warned, he said, “If those prisoners are not released, we will try to get an Israeli soldier.” I mean, he made it very clear. And if anybody believes that Israel spontaneously improvised an invasion and bombing of the country that we are witnessing today is somebody who absolutely doesn’t know anything about the nature of policymaking inside Israel.

I agree. The military campaign we are witnessing now was planned a long time ago. Even if you blame Hezbollah for sparking it, this was wargamed the way China and Taiwan have been wargamed. Definitely by Israel, probably by other governments, including the US.

So – and this is reminiscent of Iraq – why didn’t the authors of this devastation plan a humanitarian response?

This military campaign has created a humanitarian crisis that Israel must have predicted when it set out to destroy the Lebanese people’s homes and their abilities to move about the country, communicate with each other or the outside world, produce drinkable water, and receive shipments of food and medicine.

If there is not an appropriate plan to bring food and water to the people in Lebanon immediately, and to rebuild their infrastructure in short order, that compounds the criminality of this bombing campaign.

At best, I suspect, we’ll have something along the lines of the Iraqi Reconstruction, which is now coming to an end. 18 billion dollars from our pockets, through Congress to the Department of Defense, to the Halliburtons of the world, who accomplished next to nothing in terms of rebuilding Iraq.

Senator Ted Stevens might be the most important person in the world right now when it comes to the future of the Internet.

If you haven’t heard what he said, you can read the comments here or listen to them here. Suffice it to say, they suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works.

There was a great analysis of the committee’s debate on net neutrality on MyDD. It confirmed for me the need to report on these markups the way we used to report on protests through Indymedia.

Unfortunately, as the chance recording of Stevens’s comments have circulated, the analysis of the Senate debate has narrowed to self-satisfied derision.

You can see a sampling of the snarkfest below (after the jump) or read a chronology of “Mr. Stevens’ wild ride through a ’seriesof tubes’” which identifies a backlash to which I am apparently a latecomer. (I was on vacation!)

Whatever Ted Stevens says, dumb or smart, wrong or right, he still holds the fate of the Internet in his hands. You may be right about how the Internet works, you may be clever, and you may be funny, but that isn’t enough to save the Internet.

(This is what we tried to get at with the 2006 Allied Media Conference, whose theme expressed the idea “being right is not enough.”)

This trend reminds me of how people used to laugh at how stupid George Bush is, at his missteps and malopropisms. Then he took us to war, stole a second election, mortgaged the national economy, and navigated the free world to the brink of WWIII. Who’s laughing now?

Of course, humor can also be used to get people’s attention, to educate, or to make a dent in the tyrant’s armor. But that’s not what I see happening here.

An idiot can be ignored, laughed off. There’s a word for this, thanks to GWB: misunderestimating. That’s what the “series of tubes” meme tells people.

So 463 blog is right to ask about the Stevens jokes, “Who is the joke on?” But I disagree that “The goal is to get policymakers to understand why technology matters — not necessarily how it works. How many congress folks can explain clearly how oil is refined, what makes a spark plug spark, or what the perfect soil conditions are for corn?”

If it was your job to write laws that determined what kind of soil people could plant corn in, then I absolutely would expect you to know what the perfect soil conditions were for corn. In theory, this is the point of having committees.

Educating legislators is fine, but Stevens isn’t making bad policy because he doesn’t understand the technology. He’s making bad policy because he’s making the policy that the industry wants. So let’s get back to the business of motivating the users of the Internet to understand it and to exercise their ownership of the networks.

How do you use a moment like the one offered by the “series of tubes” line to educate and motivate?

This blogger at least gets into the meat of the bill, pointing out that – like his famous work on the $223 million “bridge to nowhere” – Stevens is just trying to get more money for his constituents: an expanded Universal Service Fund that would put $500 million towards building broadband in rural areas like Stevens’s Alaska. Though some of this money will get spent in Alaska, the real beneficiaries will be the phone companies who will get to sell (closed) Internet service over the subsidized infrastructure.

(I bet Stevens would give Wyden net neutrality if Wyden would give him ANWR drilling, but let’s not go there.)

Another tactic might be to riff on the “tubes” meme, now that it is so out there in people’s imaginations. Post ideas below if you’ve got them.

(Sorry if I’m being a killjoy. This is a tough time to be getting back to work.)
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This is a shortened version of an article Mike Medow and I wrote for the upcoming issue of Critical Moment. For more on the AMC 2006 and to get updates for 2007, visit the AMC website.

“You people don’t drink much decaf,” the barista in the basement of the Bowling Green State University Student Union told my friend as she purchased her morning cup. “What is this conference all about? It’s Sunday morning and we haven’t sold a cup of decaf all weekend.”

The eighth annual Allied Media Conference (AMC) had gathered in this small college town south of Toledo for the weekend of June 23-25. The weather was exceedingly pleasant, the energy was high (and not just because of the strong coffee), and more than 500 conference participants representing the cutting edge of the media movement were there to push the limits of activist media.

The theme of this year’s AMC was “From Truth to Power: Because being right is not enough.” The conference organizers posed the questions, “How can alternative media go beyond merely “speaking truth” and actually change the material conditions of our world? How do we construct popular media projects that effectively build grassroots power and advance social justice?”

This critical framework was a direct challenge to the notion that activist media can be effective if it is separated from actual organizing. As producers of the conference, we aimed to use the AMC to blur the distinction between media activism and social justice organizing.

As AMC organizers, we see the future of social justice media not in the hands of an increasingly adept and politically attuned corps of journalists, but distributed throughout the movement for racial, social, and economic justice. Just as the proliferation of participatory media has blurred the line between media consumer and producer, the line between activist and media activist is disappearing.

Since 2005, the AMC has centered the work of media justice groups with a strong race, class, gender analysis and who are committed to community organizing and movement building. This year’s conference grew to include many more young people and was much more racially diverse than it has been in the past.

We see that a political analysis formulated by the people most impacted by the media system combined with an alternative communications infrastructure emphasizing direct participation can be the basis for a mass movement to radically transform our local communities and the way we connect them across the globe.

For eight years, Bowling Green has played host to the Allied Media Conference. At this year’s conference, a major announcement was made: the conference is moving to Detroit. The AMC has traveled a long road from where it was in 1999 to where it is in 2006. But the road from Bowling Green to Detroit will take it to a place of even greater transformative possibility.

This year’s AMC saw a large number of participants from Detroit who brought the history, vision, and vitality of the city with them to the conference. Detroit Summer brought nearly two dozen young Detroiters, adult organizers, and artist mentors to the AMC, using the weekend to launch the group’s summer program, the Live Arts Media Project.

“[The AMC] was one of the best conferences I’ve been to,” Michelle Lin, a member of Detroit Summer, said. “It was great to be from Detroit. At the AMC, Detroit represented hardcore.”

While the delegation of Detroiters attending the AMC left the conference excited and energized, we recognize that the task of bringing the AMC to Detroit will not be easy.

As organizers of the conference, we have a lot of work to do to make this national independent media gathering something that is relevant and accountable to Detroiters. We are building towards June 2007 with a sense of humility and opportunity. There is a tremendous legacy of social movement in this city; to organize here is to walk in very large footsteps.

The Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet has scheduled a hearing on H.R. 5319, the “Deleting Online Predators Act” for Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

DOPA would force libraries and schools to bar minors from accessing social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, as well as any chatrooms where they “may easily access or be presented with obscene or indecent material; may easily be subject to unlawful sexual advances, unlawful requests for sexual favors, or repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature from adults; or may easily access other material that is harmful to minors.”

First term Philly-area Representative Mike Fitzpatrick is sponsoring the bill, which is a part of House Republicans’ so-called “Suburban Caucus Agenda.” From what I hear, the bill doesn’t have much chance of passage, but you never know when something is linked to kiddie porn.

Youth organizations like Mobilizing America’s Youth, which has organized a Save Our Social Networks campaign, have been campaigning against the bill. They rightly criticize the overly-broad language of the bill and its shoot-the-middle-man approach to enforcement.

Kari Lydersen wrote a great article for the New Standard that sums up all of the issues.

The exciting thing is to hear all of these youth political organizations arguing that a communications medium should be governed by its users. My hope is that they continue from this battle to other campaigns for community-defined media, including defending the open internet.

Last Thursday, Verizon filed a federal lawsuit against Montgomery County claiming the DC-area county’s franchise approval process violated federal law and the First Ammendment.

According to their press release, Verizon wants the court to force the county to negotiate a franchise in 60 days.

The County says Verizon hasn’t even submitted a formal franchise application. The lawsuit is just “Verizon’s attempt to influence federal legislation,” the chair of the council committee that oversees cable franchises, said. “It is about eradicating the role of local government.”

More dirty telco tricks to bolster a multi-million dollar lobbying spree.

In fact it’s Verizon that has been manipulating the local franchise process to their own ends. At an April hearing on state franchising, Attorney Fred Polner told the Republican House Policy Committee that Verizon was intentionally dragging out local franchise negotiations in order to bolster its petition for legislative relief. Polner represents a consortium of more than 30 Bucks county townships who came together to expedite negotiations with Verizon.

In response to Verizon’s explanation that it’s technically burdensome for them to provide services on a city-by-city basis because their wire architecture doesn’t match municipal boundaries, Polner pointed out that they built their system that way knowing full well that there was a city-by-city franchising process. They made a business decision, he said. It was a bad one and now they want the state (and federal) legislature to save them. (Chairman Civera pounded on him for his strong stance.)

On the market side, Verizon’s playing just as dirty.

Comcast has accused Verizon of intentionally cutting its cables in the same Montgomery county as the latter lays its new fiber optic lines. And Comcast sued a former employee that defected to Verizon, taking sensitive information like subscriber lists, including ‘VIP’ and ‘platinum’ customers. (Platinum must mean you get to complain to a human when you get bad service.)
Verizon has sued Vonage for patent infringement in a case an expert says they’d likely lose except for their deep pockets.

This is all reason enough to hang up on Verizon Wireless, as Jobs With Justice is requesting. The union busting is just the icing on that cake.

AT&T is just as nasty as Verizon – just less prominent in Pennsylvania. They’ve sued towns in Illinois, including Geneva, saying the franchise process doesn’t even apply to them for technical reasons. Read an interview with Pete Collins, Geneva’s Information Systems Manager.

In California, AT&T is petitioning Governor Schwarzenegger to lower the fees Caltrans is charging for rights of way over state-controlled bridges. As with Verizon in Montgomery County, it’s saying Caltrans won’t grant it access, while Caltrans says it will do so immediately if AT&T pays the required fee.

All the more reason to be concerned about AT&T’s proposed merger with BellSouth.

In a related note that will help phone companies by reducing the price consumers pay for their services, the Treasury Department recently eliminated an improperly applied tax on long distance service.

I’m happy about that, since this has historically been a “war tax,” but the IRS is planning refunds of $13 billion and the Treasury Secretary would “not specify how much of the refund might be made to businesses and how much to individuals. He also said Treasury could not yet estimate the size of refund an average individual could expect to get.” And I get kind of suspicious whenever the IRS starts cutting checks to businesses.