Driving around the other day, I turned the radio dial. Mid-song, Johnny Cash's "I've Been Everywhere" came on, and from the car seat in back, my three-year old son demanded I start the song from the beginning. I explained I couldn't control the music on the radio like the music on a CD or an iPod. That pacified him until the song ended, and he wanted to hear it again.
We had a heated discussion about the merits of broadcast technology, and while the finer points may have eluded him, my son ended with the unassailable position that it was "weird" and "stupid" that anyone would just sit around listening to whatever they're told to listen to. We went home, downloaded the tune, and he's been rocking out to it on his toy guitar ever since.
No one in our family was a rabid Johnny Cash fan before my son first heard "Folsom Prison Blues." After hearing it once, we listened to it a dozen times in one sitting, and then he began requesting Cash every time music was played. We'd been watching old Sesame Street episodes on YouTube, fine-tuning our searches to single out segments that included Elmo and/or the Cookie Monster, when one evening, my boy suggested we use Johnny Cash as the keyword.
Now when he requests a YouTube video from the man in black (or a host of other artists), my son refines his requests to a degree unimaginable 10 years ago. He doesn't just want to hear "Walk the Line." He wants to see the live version from some '90s television show; he loves it when the "old Johnny Cash" puts paper in his fret board to replicate the sound of a snare drum. Afterwards, we watch the black and white video of the same song with Cash as a very young man, sheepishly grinning as he sings his song of contrition to a wall of screaming teen girls. Then we go poking around for stuff we haven't seen before, and there's always something.
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As a kid, I listened to the radio and my dad's vinyl when he played it—Beatles, Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. It wasn't until I was 14 and my best friend played a cassette of The Who that I had a band to call my own.
Rather than any lead paint chips I may have consumed as a kid, I think my son's finding a music hero 11 years ahead of me has to do with the vast difference in the options available then and now. My son and I think differently. We may communicate in English, but he's learning a different language than I did. Though I've made my living working digitally, watching my three-year-old use the software tools I think I've mastered, I feel like an immigrant in his world. And the differences between how we interact with information give me a good deal of hope, as long as we can protect the freedom the Internet offers.
Growing up in an analog world where broadcasters and publishers had a tight stranglehold on what media and information we had access to and when it was available to us, I believe, has turned my generation (and all the others of the 20th century) into passive media consumers. We were trained to be satisfied with very little variation in our media—simply by changing the ethnicity of the cast and the setting for the story, a sitcom like All in the Family could be repackaged as The Jeffersons, and viewers would be convinced they were watching something dramatically new and different, though the plots and character dynamics were essentially identical. Since the cost of publishing or broadcasting was prohibitive, most of us adopted an often unwarranted trust and respect for those who were fortunate enough to have their messages transmitted to the masses.
The current presidential campaign, I think, reflects this entrenched passivity. Instead of real change, the American public seems ready to embrace either an African-American or a senior citizen as their new leader less because of different ideologies or visions than because this breaks the 200-year trend of white, middle-aged men becoming president. The absence of strikingly different solutions, and the lack of any frankness about the higher taxes and hard work needed to fix the problems we face, doesn't seem to bother folks. Nor do most voters find it troubling that the nation's only presidential contenders are career politicians who have served in the government that brought us to these desperate times.
While I have little hope that either of these character actors will bring dramatic change to the American political stage, if the Internet continues to be open and free, I'm excited by the possibilities the digital world offers my son's generation. Keeping the Web open and free, though, is far from a certainty.
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In 2005, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a policy statement declaring that if free speech were to be preserved online, Internet providers needed to ensure that everyone using it had equal access. The document stated that the FCC had the "jurisdiction necessary to ensure that providers of telecommunications for Internet access… [operate] in a neutral manner."
They adopted four principles to "ensure that broadband networks are… open, affordable and accessible to all consumers." Provided consumers obeyed the law, there should be no restriction on what sites they visit, which software applications they use to visit those sites, or which hardware they use. The fourth principle was that consumers were "entitled to competition among network providers," software and hardware developers, and content providers.
Earlier this month, for the first time ever, the FCC attempted to enforce this policy. They ruled formally that Comcast had violated at least two of these principles, and that they had acted illegally.
In response to a complaint filed in part by the Northampton-based FreePress, the FCC found that "Comcast Corp.'s management of its broadband Internet networks contravenes federal policies that protect the vibrant and open nature of the Internet." The FCC "concluded that Comcast has unduly interfered with Internet users' right to access the lawful Internet content and to use the applications of their choice. Specifically, Comcast had deployed equipment throughout its network to monitor the content of its customers' Internet connections and selectively block specific types of connections known as peer-to-peer connections."
While for years Comcast had denied any wrongdoing, many subscribers had complained that certain applications, like BitTorrent, which allowed users to share large digital files didn't work over Comcast's broadband connections. But studies conducted by the Associated Press and the independent Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that, indeed, Comcast was corrupting some of these transmissions and effectively killing them, denying some of their users the legal content they were seeking. Further, since Comcast is also in the business of providing digital video to its customers via video-on-demand, the FCC noted "that Comcast has an anticompetitive motive to interfere" with customers' ability to download digital video files from the Web for free.
While FreePress and others have celebrated this decision as groundbreaking, it's generally anticipated that Comcast, which earned $3.3 billion last year, will appeal the finding and resist the FCC's demands that they stop this practice and provide evidence that they've done so.
Even more troublesome, though, is that the argument Comcast is likely to use in court actually holds water. As the legislative branch of government, only the Congress can author federal laws that can be enforced. The FCC's role as an Internet watchdog has never been officially sanctioned by Congress, and the policies that the FCC says Comcast has violated are not law. In 2006, Congress rejected five different bills that would have embraced 'Net neutrality and designated the FCC as the office with the authority to enforce it.
