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Following its tradition of handing communications media over to anointed business entities, Congress is about to change the nature of the internet, transforming the last democratically functioning telecommunications sector into a class-driven corporate money machine.

As The Guide goes to press, the ostensibly high-minded Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act (COPE) is approaching a vote in the US House of Representatives. The legislative package, a pet project of Rep. Joe Barton (R.-Texas), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is actually dedicated to promoting and enhancing telecom giants such as AT&T and Verizon, and providing them with fresh opportunities for raking in cash.

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COPE's Senate counterpart, Sen. Ted Steven's (R.-Alaska) vast, lumbering Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act, is similarly pitched toward corporate greed, but unlikely to come to a vote in the near future. Both bills are, however, expected to pass, and President George W. Bush is poised to sign the result into law when the conference committee of the House and Senate sends it to his desk.

Both bills dispense with safeguards for maintaining network neutrality-- the communications principle ensuring non-discrimination, universal connectivity, and equal access for all. The legislation instead encourages a telecommunications caste system based on bandwidth and ability to pay.

Marginal content: exit here

The point of this maneuver is to give telephone and cable behemoths like Verizon, BellSouth, and Comcast pieces of the internet action coursing through their systems. Noting that content providers such as Google or Amazon.com are using their services for substantial profit, big telecommunications companies want to cash in.

The Congressional rewrite of telecommunications law sets up a two-lane information superhighway equipped with toll-collecting powers and potential roadblocks. Telecommunications companies will decide which websites are most readily accessible, rewarding those who accede to a shakedown-- and, in effect, pay protection money-- with entry into the fast lane of the cyber turnpike, relegating those who do not to the breakdown lane.

Congress is enabling major telephone and cable companies to set up digital communications networks that will become the public face of the internet in much the same way that CBS and NBC became emblematic of American broadcasting after the Communications Act of 1934.

The effect will be to turn the internet into a mass infotainment medium, and to stifle innovation. Unpopular and troublesome expression will be pushed aside or suppressed. Once under the thumb of major companies, the internet, subject to the kind of corporate censorship now commonplace in commercial television, will serve prevailing dogma and embrace the status quo.

Throughout the short history of the internet, the virtual playing field has been relatively level. Microsoft.com, anarchism.net, bankof-america.com, snot.com, planetout.com, aclu.org, gaysexblog.net, jesuschrist.com, and guidemag.com have had equal access to every wired home in America. But when a version of COPE becomes law, hierarchies will fall into place.

A company such as Verizon could impede access to Google while promoting an in-house search engine-- or one willing to shell out more money for wider and speedier distribution. It could force iTunes to take a back seat to another music source it found more lucrative or wanted to boost. It could impose the cyber equivalent of postal fees and class priorities on e-mail. (Time Warner's AOL has already begun to take that initiative.) It could force sexually-oriented websites or chat rooms to clean up their acts to the point of annihilation.

The implications for minorities, dissenters, and nonprofit groups are profound and troubling. An internet service provider could shunt aside activist websites like savetheinternet.com or antiwar.com, crippling those organizations' fundraising efforts. Websites representing sociopolitical outsiders-- sexual liberationists, leather queers, fringe religions-- could become marginalized out of existence.

Money talks

"There's no technological justification for this," said Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois in a recent discussion of COPE on the independent news program Democracy Now! "There's no economic justification. It's pure corrupt crony capitalism."

No one in Congress has exploited crony capitalism to better personal advantage than COPE sponsor Joe Barton, a powerful legislator deeply enmeshed in the oil industry. An enemy of Medicaid, environmental protections, and gay civil rights, Barton has links to the anti-gay Texas Restoration Project, a fundamentalist voter-registration drive. Ted Stevens, sponsor of COPE's Senate equivalent, is a proponent of oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and a longtime friend of corporate power.

COPE has bipartisan support, even enlisting openly gay Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts as a latecoming co-sponsor. Some dissenters, chiefly Democrats such as Frank's Massachusetts colleague Ed Markey, have mounted an impassioned opposition. But in April, an attempt by Markey to equip COPE with an amendment preserving net neutrality was shot down by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

On May 2, Markey responded by filing his own bill, the Net Neutrality Act of 2006, intended "to promote open broadband networks and innovation, foster electronic commerce, and safeguard consumer access to online content and services." The bill recommends that the US "adopt a clear policy endorsing the open nature of internet communications and freely accessible broadband networks."

The technicians who devised the World Wide Web in the early '90s intended their creation to be blind to content, globally interconnected, and free of corporate or governmental interference. But the history of the internet has been a constant drift toward content management. Much Congressional hyperventilation over the internet as a real or imagined boon to terrorists and child pornographers has served a wish to seize and exploit cyberspace for money and power. Beginning with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, whose constitutionally dubious features included a Communications Decency Act later struck down by the Supreme Court, legislators have been seeking public support for ever-tightening controls on applications of internet technology.

Other current Congressional initiatives aimed at taming the internet include attempts to mandate snooping by internet service providers. Such legislation, typically directed at "sex predators" and other popular bogeymen, enjoys the support of some lawmakers who claim to be appalled by Verizon and AT&T's cooperation with the National Security Agency's efforts to track Americans' telephone habits. The most crowd-pleasing save-the-children internet bill at present is the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) sponsored by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R.-Illinois) and other Republicans. The bill would require schools and libraries to bar minors from access to social-networking websites such as MySpace.com.

Most internet legislation currently before Congress appeals to the acolytes of a conservative business climate. Its principal boosters are the predominantly Republican proponents of a "free enterprise" system that in fact courts monopoly and oligopoly. A genuine free marketplace of ideas is, it seems, anathema to those who make a fetish of free enterprise.