There’s a great post over at All things Daniel Haggard about the reason the powers that be are fighting so hard against Net Neutrality. To make a long story short– The internet is Changing The World.

These telecom companies are all preparing to evolve into media companies. What is a media company? It’s a company that creates, and determines content. With net neutrality in place these media\telco companies will have no power to channel users into seeing the content they want them to see. Hence, right at the point these companies were looking to expand themselves into a huge, new growth opportunity, that opportunity is being taken away from them by these various web based competitors.

None of this explains why the neo-conservatives over on capitol hill want to defend the telco companies. After all they preach the virtues of democracy as much as everybody else. Certainly they want to prevent users from accessing content that doesn’t match the conservative standards they think we should aspire to. But it’s also because they want to protect the economic system they believe is the basis to a safe, prosperous society . . . Throughout the twentieth century - marketing programs were developed to manage consumers in this way. The advent of mass media made it even easier to control people through the marketing techniques that Bernays invented. These days we are being subjected to ever more sophisticated marketing techniques like online marketing, internet marketing, online promotions and the like.

But given this we can begin to see why the issue of net neutrality is so important. In order for the techniques of Bernays to work - the corporations need to have control over media content. For if they lose control over the management of content then those methods which control consumer behaviour by the association of powerful symbolic imagery with products will lose their effectiveness. We can begin to see now why the neo-conservatives are so worried. Net neutrality is a potential threat to the economic engine that drives western capitalism.

The article goes into a lot of depth about the underpinnings of our current economic system, which are founded on making people buy things they don’t need using devices such as public relations, marketing, and planned obsolescence, and how this all drives the economy and why the corporate weenies now feel threatened. For most of the last century the content we’ve seen has been fed down from the top, and control of the content was always in the hands of those who wished the market to be made up of passive consumers. Now the internet has turned that whole delivery system on its head by changing the push/pull, and completely rebuilt the dynamics of the market. And those of us who care prefer to be called HUMANS rather than consumers, a revolution staggering in its implications.

It’s not just the Telecomms who are fighting for this (outmoded) mode of business to be preserved. The RIAA lawsuits, the thrashing of Microsoft against the Open Source Movement, the FCC move to accomodate Media Company Mergers, the drive for all corporations to swallow smaller competitors . . . these are all manifestations of the same drive to preserve an economic system whose time has passed. When what we, as HUMANS instead of “consumers” buy is determined by what we decide we want instead of what we’re told we should want, the whole capitalist system comes crashing down. And the internet is driving that crash. It’s also the beginning of a new way of marketing– from the bottom up– call it Internet Capitalism. We, the people, tell YOU the producers, what it is we want, simply by finding your website and buying the item. And taking out the (useless) middle men in the process is a GOOD thing, at least for HUMANS, if not for those middle men who are fast becoming obsolete, the same way buggy whips and telegrams did.

For those of us who love the web because it’s people driven and not corporate driven (it’s why I choose it as my medium of expression and creation and have chosen to enable others in using it as my way of making a living) it’s a cause well worth fighting for, but yes, as the article points out, we do have a fight ahead of us. We won the first battle during the midterm election. We still have a lot of work to do.

Technorati Tags: Net Neutrality, Capitalism, push pull, economy, FCC, Telecomms, RIAA, Microsoft, consumer

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 3:40 pmunder Web News and . Comment RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.