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!”
Monday, March 6, 2017
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1 comment:
Oh, my. One gem after another. I thought we had already won the Net Neutrality battle.
I've lost track of where all the legitimate Net Neutrality gathering places used to be, can I still Google it (or has Google gone over to the dark side in this battle too) or what?
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