President's Perspective
China, Comcast: Birds of a Feather

(May 7, 2010) Apart from starting with the letter C, how are Comcast and China alike?

Both the capitalistic communist Asian nation and the U.S. media uber-giant – trying to grow even larger if it succeeds in swallowing up NBC Universal – use the same technology when trying to block Internet traffic.

We rail and fume against China, demanding Internet freedom from a country that hasn’t experienced the kind of media freedom Americans have enjoyed. But too many people – including policy makers – seem willing to give Comcast a pass when it puts its foot down on such file-sharing services as BitTorrent.

Much of this has to do with Comcast’s bid to free itself from “net neutrality” – the concept that all Internet traffic must be treated equally. It’s worked pretty well all this time, but industry whiners say it stifles innovation. (Given what’s happened in the last dozen or so years, that argument doesn’t hold water.)

The Federal Communications Commission caught Comcast blocking the transfer of barbershop-quartet recordings that were in the public domain, as well as Associated Press’ attempt to send the King James Bible (also, I believe, in the public domain) through a file-sharing program.

The FCC prevailed against Comcast everywhere but in the U.S. district court based in the District of Columbia. That happened early in April. The FCC may make an internal rules change to reassert its authority over the Internet – particularly important since the FCC’s unveiling in March of a national broadband policy that could otherwise be dead in its tracks.

What does all of this have to do with the Guild and its employers? Consider the mischief that Comcast and other Internet service providers could make in trying to self-regulate Internet traffic.

Would the Washington Post or the Baltimore Sun have to pony up big bucks to gain some kind of most-favored-nation status allowing unfettered access to its sites? Would smaller news organizations have to make a deal with the devil – provided they could afford it – to get Internet eyeballs? What about unions? Comcast has long been a foe of labor. What if you had to jump through hoops or pay some kind of fee (it’s not a tax if it goes to for-profit enterprise!) to get access to the sites of organizations of which you were a member?

This is why some in the Senate – most prominently Democratic Sen. Al Franken, who by virtue of his tenure on “Saturday Night Live” used to be an employee of NBC – are highly skeptical of Comcast’s promises and assurances of what a post-merger landscape would look like.

The merger deserves the closest possible scrutiny that we as a nation, we as citizens, and we as union members in our chosen field can give it.