June 29, 2006 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A contentious debate about how to regulate the Internet, now before Congress, is full of technical jargon and confusing dueling slogans, such as “Hands Off the Internet” and “Save the Internet.” But media-policy experts are urging charities not to tune it out, because the outcome could have a major impact on the way they use the Web to tell their stories or raise money.
“Many of us feel that the resolution of this debate could have enormous consequences for our economy, for our culture, and even our democracy,” Vincent Stehle, a program officer at the Surdna Foundation, in New York, told grant makers during a teleconference this month.
The controversy involves “net neutrality” (short for “network neutrality”) — the principle that phone and cable companies should treat Internet traffic that they carry over their broadband networks equally. In other words, they should not offer better service — faster speeds or dominant Web placement, for example — to companies that they are affiliated with or that are willing to pay extra.
The concept means that “no one who owns the network that you connect to has anything to say about what content you get to visit or whether there’s a special deal that makes some content come to you at a higher quality of service than others,” said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, a media-policy group in Northampton, Mass.
Opponents say that enforcing “net neutrality” could stifle the growth of the Internet, which they argue has thrived so far with minimal government regulation.
Free Press, a Surdna grantee, is the coordinator of a coalition of more than 700 organizations that want Congress to adopt legislation to enforce “net neutrality” as part of its broader effort to update the Telecommunications Act. The SavetheInternet.com coalition unites liberal groups, such as MoveOn.org and the Feminist Majority, and conservative ones such as the Christian Coalition of America and Gun Owners of America. The groups warn that without such legislation, charities and others could become unable to pay for the same level of service as corporations with deep pockets.
Concern about “net neutrality” has been growing since the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Communications Commission issued rulings last summer that classified broadband services as “information services,” thus exempt from tougher rules on nondiscrimination that apply to telecommunications services.
The nonprofit coalition lost a first round on June 8, when the House of Representatives defeated an amendment to a telecommunications bill that would have required phone and cable companies to operate their broadband networks in “a nondiscriminatory manner,” without charging fees for enhanced service. The debate now moves to the Senate Commerce Committee.
On the other side of the issue, Mike McCurry, former spokesman for President Bill Clinton, represents a coalition of telecommunications companies and others who argue that the best way to ensure that the Internet offers high-quality service to everyone is to let entrepreneurs respond to consumer demand.
Mr. McCurry told the grant makers that the companies that operate broadband networks need to find ways to manage the rapidly growing volume of data that is traveling over the Internet — and should be free to ask big companies, such as Google or eBay, to help foot the bill. “The Internet of today, which proponents of net neutrality seem to want to freeze in place, can’t handle the traffic that all the organizations and the people that you care about are going to be putting into the Internet in the future,” he said.
Helen Brunner, director of the Media Democracy Fund, a new nonprofit group in Washington that aims to increase philanthropy for media-policy issues, urged foundations to call their grant recipients together or at least send them letters to help them “understand what they have at stake in this new communications arena.”
Sponsors of the teleconference included Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media, in New York; and the Innovation Funders Network and Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, both in San Francisco.
