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February
27, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
Politicians
Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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February 27,
2002
Wired for Business or Democracy?
By Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
While Internet stocks may have crashed, Internet
optimists still abound.
In Next:
The Future Just Happened (W.W. Norton, 2001), for example,
author Michael Lewis celebrates what he sees as the unstoppable
momentum of the digital age, the liberating effect of digital
technologies and the inherent ability of the new technologies
-- and those, ever younger, who generate them -- to overcome
the vested interests of establishment organizations.
Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig
has a new book, too (The
Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World,
Random House, 2001). But Lessig is no optimist, at least not
now.
While he is as much a fan of Internet
technologies as Lewis, Lessig argues that corporate interests
are conspiring to destroy the Internet's essentially free nature,
thereby putting a stranglehold on its development and quashing
many of its best potential features.
By free, Lessig means not that one can
get on the Internet for free, but that its crucial layers are
either unowned or accessible to all on a nondiscriminatory basis.
Now cable interests, copyright holders and others are working
at different points to rob the Internet of these freedoms.
Where telephone companies were required
by "common carriage" regulations to be neutral and
open -- to let anyone use the telephone wires, without regard
to what they were saying or doing -- cable companies do not operate
under such regulatory strictures. As people move from a reliance
on telephone modem connections to the Internet to high-speed
broadband cable connections, this regulatory difference has critically
important implications.
"Cable companies have the power
and the right legally to exercise much more control over what
happens on the network," Lessig told us. "They are
building technologies and deploying technologies that will enable
discrimination in the content and applications that run on the
network."
For example: "Policy-based routing
is implemented through a router that allows the cable owner to
choose which content flows quickly, which content flows slowly,
what applications are permitted and what applications are not."
The cable companies can enable their preferred content to move
quickly while competitors' content is slowed.
AOL-Time Warner represents the biggest
threat to Internet freedom in this respect. Time Warner has a
huge library of proprietary "content" -- magazine articles,
movies, cartoons, music -- AOL controls tens of millions of people's
access to the Internet through their proprietary software, and
Time Warner is a major cable operator.
Notes Lessig, "This vertical integration
creates all the wrong incentives for keeping the platform of
the network open."
But the future of the Internet is not
just under threat from cable operators. The expanding application
of ever-more restrictive copyright rules -- in many cases now
going far beyond any legitimate protections -- is further endangering
Internet freedom and technological development.
On the Internet, the influence of copyright
is potentially much more insidious and pervasive than is immediately
obvious. If you put a picture of Mickey Mouse on your personal
website, you might reasonably figure, Disney is not going to
come after you. (And if your site is a parody, you might even
know that you have First Amendment protections against copyright
claims.) But the company may go after your Internet service provider,
demanding it remove your copyright-infringing website or face
litigation. Such demands, delivered through "cease-and-desist"
letters, are issued all the time, with a huge chilling effect
on Internet creativity and discussion.
Expanded copyright protections -- pushed
by an aggressive copyright bar and copyright holders, such as
Disney and the movie studios -- are increasingly blocking Internet
users' ability to disseminate information and ideas on the web.
And, they are disabling new technologies that rely on various
kinds of electronic copying.
Opportunities remain to restore freedom
to the Internet and turn back the controllers. To expand competition
to the cable monopolists, Lessig says, the government should
supply a broad space for high-speed wireless Internet. He calls
for new regulations that would impose common carriage rules on
cable Internet services, so that cable operators could not discriminate
in favor of their preferred content. And he proposes limiting
the scope and duration of copyright, so that the public domain
is enhanced, and much more frequent compulsory licensing of content
that remains copyrighted (enabling non-copyright holders to use
content, but with a requirement that they pay a license fee).
But Lessig confesses to being skeptical
about the prospects of success. While he is a strong booster
of Internet technologies, he recognizes that the potential embedded
in a technology only presents possibilities. How a technology
actually unfolds also depends on politics and legal arrangements
-- that is, the balance of power in society. And now, he says,
"the powers on the side of changing the Internet are much
stronger than the powers on the side of preserving" its
freedoms.
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor
. They are co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999)
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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