STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Monday, 2 March 2015

[Demeter]

18. Matt Stoller: The Broader Net Neutrality Narrative

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/03/matt-stoller-broader-net-neutrality-narrative.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

By Matt Stoller, who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, The Nation and Reuters. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller. Originally published at Medium

In early 2006, AOL and Yahoo announced plans to charge senders of email a small ‘postage fee’ to have their email delivered to AOL and Yahoo customers. This fee would cost roughly one fourth of a penny per email, so small as to be virtually insignificant. While not particularly onerous in the context of real space, where delivering mail has per item costs, this was a potential blow to the emerging politics of the internet world.

At the time, these companies argued that this postage fee was a measure that would help reduce spam and identity theft. It would ensure that legitimate email would be delivered, in the priority that recipients would like. Oh, and it would help email services place themselves as middlemen in the communications space, taking a slice of a penny here or there from senders while serving ads to their users. A quarter of a penny per email sounds like an insignificant sum, but there are roughly 100 billion emails sent every day. So it adds up.

This happened within a particular political context. Organizations that had captured the political energy from controversies over the war in Iraq, 9/11, and the Clinton impeachment had built themselves through large email lists. The organizers quickly realized that move by AOL and Yahoo could eliminate their ability to organize. They quickly make their opposition known, and this plan was beaten back before it had a chance to be implemented. The consequences of this scuffle were enormous, though it’s hard to argue that what is important is what never happened. Yet, think for a moment. Had this attempt at postage pricing succeeded, it is unlikely that Barack Obama would have defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and it’s possible that a whole bevy of interesting and important centers of cultural influence — Kickstarter, for example — would not exist today. I was a peripheral part of the group that worked on this postage fee problem, and it was the first indication I got that pricing laws were essential tools of political power.

Of course, I didn’t think of it this way, because the underlying principle of a political movement takes time to emerge. But this was the first exposure the liberal space got to industrial policy, pricing power, and antitrust. And it trained a bunch of us to recognize the net neutrality problem as a similar, critical threat.

MUCH MORE HISTORY, ANALYSIS AND HOPE AT LINK