U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog: Supreme Court Brand X, Grokster Rulings Threaten Open Internet

Today's Supreme Court decisions in the Brand X and Grokster cases threaten the vitality of the Internet. While your connection is faster now under broadband, the net's Golden Age began under old dialup rules. The Internet grew rapidly as an engine of technological innovation and a force for democratic communication revolution because when everyone connected through dialup the phone companies were required to treat everybody, from consumers to competitors, fairly. No more. The Brand X decision paves the way for a corporate oligarchy of the Internet, with the cable companies and the Big Baby Bells dividing up the net and stifling everything that has made it great.

The dialup Internet was regulated as a "telecommunications service." Now, the Supremes agree with Michael Powell's small-visioned FCC that the broadband Internet should be subject to weaker "information service" rules, which will allow the cable companies (and soon the Bells after the FCC broadens the ruling to apply to them, too) to discriminate against competitors and treat customers like chattel.

The companies controlling access to the Internet will also control what websites consumers have access to, be able to slow down transport of content they do not own (whether email from consumers or public interest groups or content from companies they do not own), and to otherwise restrict consumer freedom of speech and dumb down the Internet. For more information, I encourage you to read what Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, has to say.

The court also ruled against innovation in the file sharing case Grokster. The ruling is bad, but it doesn't go as far as Hollywood and the record companies wanted the Court to go. We'll have more later after we analyze the decision, but here is some background on P2P:

Peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) is an efficient and innovative part of Internet architecture that has already made it easier for consumers to communicate legal (public domain documents and music and film) ideas with each other directly. P2P may now be under greater attack on Capitol Hill, since the Court didn't go as far as Hollywood and the record companies wanted. For more information, and to access a report released earlier this year by PIRG, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America and Free Press, see our P2P page. In that report we showed that P2P technologies eliminate the congestion and cost of central servers and distribute bandwidth requirements throughout the network and therefore are an engine of growth and innovation that help to expand freedom of expression and the flow of information.