The Weekly Screed (#805)

Jack Palance takes charge
by David Benjamin

“Net neutrality requires internet services providers to charge equal rates and offer equal speeds for all data usage. Without the policy, a telecommunications company — like Pai’s former employer Verizon — would be allowed to impose blocks on websites at its discretion or allow providers to create so-called fast lanes for preferred sites while other internet destinations lag on slower connections”
                                    — Kelly Weil, The Daily Beast

BARCELONA — It’s always about cattlemen and homesteaders.

At the Mobile World Congress here last week (an annual pilgrimage with Hotlips, crack technology reporter), I got my first glimpse of Jack Palance, new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

His civilian name is Ajit Varandaraj Pai, but as an aficionado of Western movies since Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, I instantly pegged this tall, cool drink of rotgut as the cattlemen’s official, dressed-in-black, silver-plated, pearl-handled gunslinger.

In the movies, the cattlemen are few but powerful. They lean back on their chairs in front of the saloon and palaver about the “free range,” meaning that it should be free for them to graze their beeves unfettered — from the rim of the Rockies to the Big Muddy floodplain — devouring its bounty entirely for their own enrichment and denying it to anyone who might prefer any purpose other than fattening a herd of steers that stretches as far as a cowpony can gallop in a hard-ridden hour.

When the cattlemen talk of grass and wildflowers, they use words like “fodder” and “feed.” Their word for oak and willow, hickory and spruce, is “lumber.” They don’t refer to “soil,” but call it the “range” or ”grazing rights.”  Likewise, they never say “water,” but “water rights,” which are privileges exclusive somehow to cattlemen, and their cattle.

The cattlemen’s nemesis are homesteaders, whom the cattlemen deride as “sodbusters,” johnny-come-lately settlers who arrive with the belief that the “open range” is as open to them, to their uses and dreams, to their families, farms, fences, crops and livestock, as it is to the cattlemen.

The cattlemen’s eternal mission — in movies, life and metaphor — is to disabuse the homesteaders of this democratic delusion.

The American struggle has always pitted an established few, claiming everything, against a sun-browned immigrant multitude who, after a week, or a month, or a lifetime of grueling labor, come around to harvest time — or payday — expecting, at least, something.

The few, who own the purse and knot the pursestrings, typically reply, “No. It’s ours.” And if the many put up a fuss, the few — the cattlemen — bring in a well-dressed assassin to reinforce their “rights” — to everything.

We’ve all seen the movie.

In the realm of telecommunications, which provides people access to phone calls, TV, radio, social media and“alt-right” propaganda, the “open range”is called “net neutrality.” The “open net’s” cattlemen are its colossal service providers — mainly AT&T, Verizon, T- Mobile and Sprint — the kings of the range.

We’re the homesteaders.

“Net neutrality” is the Homestead Act. It lets us share the Internet equally with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint. Net neutrality means it’s okay to put a fence around our vegetables and draw water (“content”) from the same creek where AT&T’s longhorns trample, piss and scare away the beavers. Net neutrality isn’t everything. But it’s something. Until January 20, it was protected, sort of, by the FCC.

That’s when the cattlemen installed their gunslinger.

The first thing Jack Palance — rather, Ajit Pai — did when he came to town on the cattlemen’s dime was to kill an investigation by previous chairman Tom Wheeler. He was probing “zero-rating” plans that apparently permit mobile phone users to stream data, in Pai’s words, “for free.” Wheeler focused on the speed limits applied to this “free” data. He suspected that zero-rating might favor certain data over other data, to “bait-and-switch” consumers (homesteaders) into paying extra for less “buffering.”

There’d still be water in the creek, but it wouldn’t be as deep, swift or clear.

“Cattlemen? Damming the creek? Hogwash!” said Pai, twirling his six-shooter.

In the movies, the first thing Jack Palance did when he came to town on the cattlemen’s dime was to kill Stonewall Torrey, the bravest homesteader on the range.

In the movies, the cattlemen declare that they’re entitled. They own the range, the water, the mountains and the forests, because they got here first. In fact, we know — from history class — that they only got here early. Before the range was safe for cattle to graze and cowboys to call home, the government moved in, displacing, marching, starving, raping, cheating and killing off the native people who really did get here first.

The Internet is like that. The Web’s forgotten founding natives were a bunch of far-flung U.S. government hunter-gatherers who turned electromagnetic spectrum into a sort of magical planetary party line that I don’t even remotely understand (even though I’m regularly asked to write about it). As word spread and gold was discovered on the Web, its founders, like the Mohicans and Sioux, were shunted onto a reservation — not even allowed to open a casino.

The telecom cattlemen wasted no time taking over the range. They became regulators against regulation, infesting the FCC and insisting that they’re entitled because they were here all along. Whenever they got a Republican president, they hired a gunslinger to deal with the squatters.

We’re the squatters. We lean on fences and talk, we plow the back forty, feed the pigs and pull up the occasional stump. But, as a fighting force, we’re a mess — dispersed, disorganized, insolvent, outsmarted and outgunned. Now that Jack’s in town and Stonewall is six feet under, who’s left to protect our homesteads? Who’s going to keep the creek flowing? And where the hell is Shane? Why is he riding off into the sunset? Why is he leaning over in the saddle?

“Shane?! Come back! SHANE!”