In a speech delivered last October, Michael Copps, one of the two Democratic commissioners on the FCC and a leading opponent of media concentration, worried that the freewheeling Internet that we've come to love "may be dying" because "entrenched interests are positioning themselves to control the Internet's choke-points, and they are lobbying the FCC to aid and abet them."

Comcast is the main example of such an entrenched interest. In an interview, Copps declined to comment specifically on Comcast and Disney, but he seemed cool to the idea of a merger, noting that the "marriage between distribution and content" has troubled him in the past. Copps called for the FCC to study whether a network neutrality regime might be in order "to keep bad things from happening. I think we need to be studying this in a sustained way and committing some resources to this at the commission."

To free marketers, such ideas are silly. Adam Thierer, the director of telecommunications studies at the Cato Institute, explains it this way: "The way to frame this issue is as the battle between dumb pipes and smart pipes," he says. People like Copps and Lessig want broadband Internet consumers to use dumb pipes, "a high-speed, flexible pipe that anybody can use for any purpose, transmit anything they want on it, no restrictions at all."

Companies like Comcast might want a smart pipe, "where you turn on your broadband connection and you get a welcome screen that could provide a launching pad to that company's Web site. It might suggest you use a certain service. It might even say that as a condition of the deal you can only use certain products." Comcast's smart pipe might even be really smart, perhaps cunning -- it could allow Disney's movies to stream to your house at a hugely increased rate, while movies from Time Warner come in at a slower clip.

So what's better -- a smart pipe or a dumb pipe? It's completely up to the customer, Thierer says. Many people will want a restriction-free dumb pipe. But "my poor mother, when she gets online she's utterly helpless. Some people need integrated intelligence. When they sign a contract they're going to expect a little more than a new big fast pipe." So if some people want dumb pipes and some people want smart pipes, why not let the market choose?

Comcast offers a variation on this position. It should be free, it says, to favor some content on its network over other content -- but whether it does so or not will be circumscribed by market forces, and in the end consumers won't be harmed.

Asked about the specific possibility that Comcast might stream Disney movies at a preferred speed, David Cohen, Comcast's executive vice president, said, "There's no doubt we could do that -- whether we would want to do it or not, I don't know." Cohen said he saw nothing wrong with that practice: "What's the difference between that and what Yahoo and Google and MSN do today in terms of the order of the results on search engines?" he asked. If Google is allowed to make money by selling Barnes & Noble a "sponsored link" for the keyword "books," why can't Comcast make money by having a kind of "sponsored," high-speed content on its network? But then, Cohen added, if Comcast gave Disney's content pride of place on its broadband network, "Time Warner would go to Verizon, and they would try and cut a similar deal. And they would market the hell out of their product -- which is why we probably wouldn't want to do that." In Comcast's view, then, everything would work out fine in the end, since the free market would curtail bad behavior on the network.

In practice, there's reason to believe that things won't work out so cleanly. The first problem is that the broadband market isn't currently as competitive as Cohen envisions it. Remember George, the Philly resident who can't get DSL? There are millions of others like him, people stuck with service from Comcast because DSL isn't available in their area. And even if DSL is available, it's still hard to conclude that the broadband market is extremely competitive. Two competitors don't usually make for a price war; they tend to divide up the available business and play nice. And then you have the problem that DSL is slower than cable. So, yes, Verizon could sign a deal with Time Warner and market the hell out of its Time Warner movies service, as Cohen suggests. But Disney movies on Comcast would still have an unfair advantage, since they would enjoy a faster overall speed. And wouldn't Comcast market the hell out of that?

Tim Wu, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who has written extensively on broadband policy, compares the market that might come about in a world without regulation to today's software industry. "Have you ever noticed that Microsoft applications just seem to work better [than other companies' software] on Windows?" he asks. Sure there's heated competition -- "but for some reason Microsoft programs like Word or Excel always kind of have a slight advantage." That's what might happen in the broadband world. Disney movies might just somehow always have the edge on Comcast's network.

But that's not what worries Wu the most. If Disney movies received a slight bump in speed, that would be troubling -- but what if Comcast, seeing that it was making a lot of money from streaming films online, decided to rejigger the network to favor movies over all other network traffic? What if it optimized the network for downloads over uploads (which, in fact, most companies do today), or it gave movie content preference over streaming audio content, or it limited file-sharing programs to make sure that its movies weren't being pirated online? What if, in short, Comcast-Disney created, as Wu fears, a "bias toward a certain design" of the network, a bias that fit well with the company's content business but that stifled the growth of whole new uses of the Internet?

"The most important engine of economic growth is applications development," Wu says. "It's when someone invents something like e-mail or the World Wide Web. But economic rationality and business plans aren't always the same thing. They may decide that the way the Internet will make money is by delivering content. But if you optimize the network for that purpose only, you eventually lose the power of the network as a development platform."

Wu's idea of the perfect network, one that's completely neutral as a development platform, is the electricity grid. "It's a wonderful, wonderful platform for innovation on a number of electric devices -- toasters, cellphones, computers." The secret of the network, Wu says, is something he terms "disinterested carriers," by which he means that the companies that run the electricity grid are divorced from the ones that make electric devices. You can imagine the trouble we might have if powerful appliance makers merged with the largest power firms: You'd get hair dryers working in some outlets and radios working in others, and consumers always wondering whether this appliance was compatible with that power company.

Thankfully, the Internet is not like that, yet. But the Comcast-Disney merger wouldn't help; the most troubling thing about Comcast becoming the world's largest media firm is that it would have constant interest in policing the network, an ever-present incentive to subtly, or not so subtly, favor one use of its pipes over another.

The company's bandwidth limits on traffic can be seen as an early sign of this policy. According to Burstein, of DSL Prime, Comcast's monthly download limit -- which he's been able to glean, approximately, from online discussion groups -- is just about what a person might use if he watched a high-quality video stream for an hour every day. In other words, Burstein says, Comcast is "protecting their HBO assets." With pay services like Movielink, or free news and sports channels available all over the Internet these days, it's possible to get a lot of very good video via the Net. Comcast, a firm that makes most of its money from selling cable TV, can't be too happy with this new source of video coming into people's homes -- and limiting bandwidth is an easy way to make sure such a thing can't get out of hand.

The company denies these charges. Cohen said that the company has cut off a very small number of its customers for exceeding bandwidth limits, and they were all people who "were obviously using our residential service for commercial purposes." He added that "if you're streaming video 24 hours a day, you would not get cut off from our service."

But Cohen's assurances are hard to square with what four Comcast customers told Salon. They were all warned about exceeding traffic limits. All, including George, denied using Comcast's lines to run a commercial service; all said they thought it was streaming video and audio that got them in trouble. To these customers, Comcast's actions seemed totally arbitrary. They said they had no idea how the firm determined whom to warn and whom to ignore. And when asked, the company would give them no explanation of its actions.

It's certainly doesn't sound like a good template for the future of the Internet. "But they're used to being a monopoly -- that's how they behave," said Jaime Todaro, a former Comcast customer who lives in Maryland. "They really have a basic 'Take it or leave it' attitude."

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