iPower Predicts the Death of the Internet

Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2008
By David Sarno

Isthe Internet going the way of the dodo? It is if you ask iPower, theBelgian filmmaker-activist group whose "Athene" YouTube show I wrote about a few weeks ago. In a video that became the number one story on Digg yesterday and is today one of YouTube's most viewed,the group claimed it had an inside source at a major telecommunicationscompany who told them that the telco industry was colluding on a planto make the Internet subscription-based, kind of like cable TV. You'dpay a standard fee for your 'basic' sites--the high profile, mainstreamsites that everyone uses, and would have to pay extra to access thelittle guys.

According to iPower's apocalyptic vision, thenew paradigm would obliterate net neutrality--and the Internet as weknow it, because once you put a tiered system in place, most userswould choose not to pay extra for the non-mainstream stuff, and thosesites would be extincted.

Warning: this video is long. Butyou can get the basic idea in the first couple of minutes.Incidentally, Tania's cleavage is a central part of iPower's publicitystrategy.

Watch the video here

Diggcommenters cried foul on iPower's scandalous and unsourced claims. Ifthe telecommunications companies were making back room plans to gut theInternet, people wrote, that would certainly be an antitrust violation.Second, there's an entire sector of companies whose raison d'etre is toinnovate online--if they got their access revoked, a big fat slice ofthe economy would go poof. Take a site like Google, which is built tohelp users navigate a limitless Web. But if the Web was just a fewhundred (or a few thousand) sites--a search engine as powerful asGoogle would be pointless.

So iPower's claim doesn'treally add up. I spoke to Reese Leysen, one of iPower's members, and heswore that a high-level contact at one of the companies told him it wasso. I'm tempted to believe Leysen since he's been a straight shooterbefore, but as is often the case with secrets, whatever secondhandtruth he was handed probably got further muddled in translation.

Itseems plausible that the businesses that control the Internet might behaving conversations about a next generation profit model--which mightinclude ways they can decide which sites get to use their networks.It's an old prediction that without net neutrality laws, the big,high-traffic Web businesses would get the royal treatment--a sort ofHOV lane on the Internet highway--and everyone else would fight for thescraps of bandwidth left over. But in a way, that's sort of what iPoweris predicting, even if their specifics are off. The details of anonneutral Internet don't matter as much as the big picture: once youmake the net a pay-for-play system, it stops being a medium and startsbeing a market.