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September 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda It was only a couple of days after Barack Obama was elected president when Susan Crawford’s phone rang in the middle of the night. “We want you to come work with us,” said a member of the transition team. Susan couldn’t believe it.
Crawford, 49, a calm, charming, blue-eyed woman with short and curly hazel hair, recalls that moment vividly. “I started jumping up and down,” she says. She was excited by the chance to help the candidate she voted for, the man she watched through tears while he spoke at Grant Park in Chicago. “I had this strain of earnestness in me ‘Oh! I get to help! I get to help!’”
For this Yale-educated professor of law, leading the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) transition team was the opportunity of a lifetime. She was primed for the job, having served five years on the board of the Internet governing body, known as ICANN. For her, this was a chance to put technology policy at the forefront.
She spent one year at the White House, initially leading the FCC during the transition and then serving under Larry Summers at the National Economic Council with a newly-coined title: President’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy. Wired even called her “the most powerful geek close to the president.”
SEE ALSO: Domain Wars: The Big Money Scramble for New Web Turf“I had tremendous power…potentially,” she says. Crawford explains that her real influence depended on the ability of her boss, Summers, to “throw his weight around.” But Summers and the rest of the administration were dealing with the economic crisis and the health care debate. Tech policy was not exactly a priority.
For Crawford, this was a problem for one very big reason. At the time, she’d become increasingly concerned about the gradual monopolization of Internet access by a few large providers. The central issue, as she explains in her upcoming book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, is that the telecommunications market has been deregulated to the point where real competition no longer exists. With fewer service provider options, prices might go up, but the quality of service doesn’t necessarily do the same. That’s because there is no incentive for Internet providers to innovate and improve.
Disillusioned, Crawford left D.C. at the end of 2009 to go back to teaching, but not before realizing that a telecommunications crisis was looming.
How did we end up in this situation? In the ’90s, the only option for an Internet connection was via phone companies, although “common carriage” rules ensured that older companies owning networks –- like phone copper lines –- would open them up to new competition. Then, with the introduction of cable, the U.S. government determined that deregulating the market (allowing for free competition) would ensure good service and low prices. It was a clear case of free market thinking: the idea that more lax regulation would allow private companies to fight each other. Their commercial war would bring down prices and increase the number of consumer options.
When President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act on Feb. 8, 1996, The New York Times reported that the bill “knocks down regulatory barriers and opens up local telephone, long-distance service and cable television to new competition.” And for a while, it did. By the year 2000, thanks to common carriage rules, according to the U.S. Census, there were more than 9,000 ISPs in America.
But this competition bonanza wouldn’t last long. In the early 2000s, the FCC deregulated the broadband market with two key decisions. In 2002, it decided not to extend common carrier rules to cable companies. And in 2005, the agency dropped the line sharing rule for DSL service, as well. According to the non-profit Media Access Project, both decisions were due to “massive lobbying” from cable and telecom companies. By 2005, the number of ISPs pummeled by 74% to less than 2,500.
Phone line Internet connections couldn’t keep up with cable speeds and new fiber networks (much faster than the traditional ones on phone copper lines). To compete against cable was just too expensive. Meanwhile, the dotcom crash, which led many broadband startups to file bankruptcy, helped consolidate the market even more.
In an editorial published last year, The New York Times noted that, instead of the expected burst of competition the 1996 Telecommunications Act was meant to provoke, “we have seen a relentless push for consolidation within and across technological platforms, carving the market into national and regional oligopolies.”
In the last few years, ATT and Verizon have mostly focused efforts on wireless, since they can’t really compete with cable in the wired market. Verizon launched its fiber network FiOS in 2004. It now reaches 17 millions homes and 5 million Internet subscribers.
SEE ALSO: Is This the Ultimate Map of the Internet? [PICS]However, in December 2011, the company announced it would not expand its networks’ reach beyond what it had originally planned. Nevertheless, Verizon spokesman Bill Kula told Mashable that his company’s competition is fierce. “We compete head-to-head in a very aggressive fashion. It’s combat on the street, guerrilla warfare.” Kula confirmed, though, that there are no plans to offer FiOS in markets where Verizon lacks existing relationships with customers. In other words, if Verizon isn’t already in your city, don’t expect it to come anytime soon — although, Kula said the company will evaluate expansion in upcoming months.
Such circumstances have led to a de-facto monopolized market, Susan Crawford argues. According to a newly released study by the New America Foundation, “In the future, consumers wishing to subscribe to higher speed Internet services will likely face a near monopoly from cable providers, as telephone providers have halted wide-scale upgrades of their networks.”
To make matters worse, major cable companies don’t compete with each other in local markets, which they have effectively divided up. The result, as the study concludes, is that in many places, you will soon only have one choice when connecting to the Internet.
Cable companies now dominate the high-speed Internet market. Sure, at the national level they seem extremely competitive. In reality, Comcast actually has 33% market share, whereas Time Warner Cable has 17%.
But at the local level, it’s worse. Cable companies have divided local markets and agreed not to compete with each other. The FCC estimates that if nothing changes, in the near future, 75% of American households will only have one choice for high-speed Internet in their local areas.
In that scenario, consumers have no choice but to pay a set price for a service that may or may not be the best. It also creates a secondary and equally troubling problem: If someone can’t afford the service, then they have to do without it. In other words, it creates an actual digital divide.
“We end up with two Internets, two societies in America,” Crawford says. One America only does some tweeting and Facebooking on their inferior, slower wireless devices. The other America not only gets to enjoy online video, but can also apply for jobs, video conference, get an online education and, ultimately, live in the 21st century.
But this is a relatively silent problem.
To understand this crisis, Crawford says, “you have to pay attention for more than five minutes.” Also, the changes that have brought us to the current situation have been “incremental,” so “we don’t realize that we’re about to be boiled.” Crawford believes the situation is analogous to the banking crisis. “People would not have cared about the banking regulatory system, unless there had been a market crash.”
According to Richard John, a Columbia University professor and historian who specializes in telecommunications history, this attitude is unlikely to change because telecommunications issues are too technical and detailed for the average person. In fact, he believes that only an “elite” of educated academics and politicians really understand it.
He may not be far off. According to Pew Research Center’s Home Broadband 2010 report, 53% of Americans don’t think the spread of affordable broadband should be a major government priority. But the majority of those are not Internet users (only 5% of people without Internet access think the government should make it a priority).
According to the latest data available, 62% of Americans have broadband Internet connections, which is lower than previous figures for April 2009 (63%) and May 2010 (66%). These numbers are a far cry from countries like South Korea, where virtually every citizen (95%) has high-speed Internet access. And speed is not the only problem. In America, access to fiber costs six times more than places like Hong Kong. It’s worth noting that Hong Kong has an obvious advantage –- high population density –- which makes the cost of building a new network really low. But by that reasoning, Manhattan should have similar levels of broadband connectivity — it doesn’t.
Other countries like France or Japan enjoy lower prices because of higher competition, which is encouraged and protected by government regulation. For example, according to the New America Foundation study, in Paris, five different providers offer “triple play” bundle services (Internet, TV and Phone) at very competitive prices. The cost is around $30-35 per month, for a download speed of up to 100mbits. In New York, the best-ranked bundle offer costs $90, but offers a download speed four times slower. In a ranking of the best “triple play” offers, the first U.S. city (Chattanooga, Tenn.) ranks 30th out of the 57 U.S. and World cities analyzed for the study.
The solution, Crawford believes, is government regulation. According to her, Internet access should be considered a public utility, just like water or electricity. Doing so would make Internet access a natural monopoly: The government would provide the pipe and guarantee equal opportunity of access to everybody, having the power to regulate costs and guarantee competition. The FCC could tackle the problem, but under pressure from telecom and cable lobbies, and without the administration pushing for a change, this hasn’t happened.
SEE ALSO: United States to UN: Keep Your Hands Off the InternetA government leash was not a strategy Crawford came to lightly. Born in 1963, Crawford grew up alongside the Internet, although at that time, it existed as a military project and then as a privilege for academia. She graduated with a degree in music from Yale and then went to Yale Law School, where she got her Juris Doctor in 1989. She had her first real encounter with cyberspace in Los Angeles at a small law firm. The business had email, something practically unheard of at the time.
Later, when she moved to the D.C. law firm Wilmore, Cutler and Pickering, she met David Johnson, whom she describes as a “real guru.” Johnson, who is now a professor at New York Law School, was one of the early thinkers of the Internet era. He was so influential that, according to Crawford, it was he who told Lawrence Lessig, now one of the most important Internet policy thinkers in the world, that “cyberspace was cool.”
It was then when Crawford fell in love with cyberspace and understood its significance. “I think it’s the most important intellectual development of our time,” she says. “It’s the defining interesting idea of our era.” That’s why it’s important for the government to protect it. “The future of high-speed Internet access depends on government creation of a level playing field.” Without that, we have an unbalanced market and a looming crisis.
Historically, what’s happening in the telecommunications world is nothing new. John explains, “In the 19th century, lawmakers tried to encourage competition in the telegraph market, and it led to the exact opposite outcome: a consolidated dominant player we all know as Western Union. We’re replaying that history today,” he says. He adds that a look back at history, when people coordinated communication networks on the basis of anti-monopoly, versus when people have coordinated based on regulation, the latter is superior. He points to the telephone and telegraph as proof. “[That’s why] it’s time for the government to assert its authority, in order to ensure that certain basic values are upheld.”
To some, regulation might not achieve the desired effect, though. “Right now, the industry changes so rapidly that it’s hard to imagine a set of regulations that will generate more good than harm,” says Scott Wallsten, vice president for research and senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. For him, the focus of the debate should be to give lower-income citizens more affordable Internet.
The telecom companies, on the other hand, not only think there is no need for new regulation, but believe there’s already too much. “We believe there is far more regulatory oversight that exists in the communications environment than should,” said Verizon spokesman Kula. “The competitive marketplace, not the FCC or other regulators, should dictate and determine how competition is ignited in the United States.”
For any change to happen, Crawford says elected officials have to acknowledge the problem, which she learned is no easy feat. More importantly, the average person has to learn why this is his problem and why he should care. Otherwise, the silent crisis carries on.
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