Me, writing today at TMV, after struggling to get the Hope Bus video uploaded:
Despite any of the talk about Net Neutrality, networks are right now enforcing a tiered level of offerings that disadvantages production at all service levels. Where I live I can only get a 6 MB incoming line. Outgoing I'm limited to half the speed of a 1990s era 512k connection. They will not even sell me more if I am willing to pay extra!We have seen this happen before. Broadcasting itself started out as an open platform, built by innovators, nurtured by government and fostered by and for educators. Once it was developed industry moved in. Promising improvements they pushed every notion of citizen production aside. It required, we were told, trained industry professionals to do anything worthwhile.
Cable did the same thing. Begun in rural Pennsylvania as a means to deliver broadcast signals to rural homes, CATV (CoAxial cable TV) used the promise of localism through channels dedicated to educational and governmental services and Public Access TV, to take on the broadcast network monopoly. Once it had its toehold, it starved and marginalized those channels. That same thing is happening today with the Internet.
YouTube, we're told, is filled with marginal citizen-produced nonsense and gets most of its traffic through pirated programming. Remix culture -- citizen use of the mediasphere -- is criminalized as piracy. And every attempt to by you and me to upload quality versions of what we produce is literally slowed down (and deteriorated) through service tiers that won't permit fast uploads.Don't get me wrong, citizens reap great benefits from the Interent and we will see vast improvements over what we had before. We'll even be permitted to produce in the margins. But it's obvious to me that the days of the internet as citizens' media production haven are numbered.
