Doc Searls’ recent article Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes is a sprawling manifesto that branches off into several different directions (both in his article, and in the ensuing discussions about it that have cropped up elsewhere).

Doc Searls’ Saving The Net article basically covers an emerging phenomenon in the US: the growing consolidation of regional communications networks by telephone and cable companies. And, the suggestion by an SBC executive that the telcos and cablecos are looking at selectively charging for the information packets that flow through their “pipes”. The telcos and cablecos supply in one way or another, much of the highbandwidth connections for residential customers in the US. They also own and lay out much of the fiber and hardware necassary to bring these connections into homes. There has been evidence that some of these companies engage in public disinformation campaigns to discourage municipal fiber-to-home projects, so that they can corner the market on these services.

Doc Searl is warning us that the cable and telco consolidation is very close to completion, and that once they control the only broadband “pipes” that can bring data into homes, then they will begin controlling who sends data across those “pipes”. This will effectively destroy the open nature of the internet for people in the US.

Searl’s article and the ensuing discussions online have branched off into different directions:

1. How the “pipes” of the carriers can be bypassed employing different social and technological solutions

2. How we should change the language and metaphors that we are using to reflect the realities, and use this langauge to fight the consolidation and “walling off” of the internet in the US. (good example is this blog posting at OnTheCommons.org)

On the language and metaphors front, once effective language and metaphors are being employed, people will need very effective ways to apply pressure to governments and corporations. This is somethign that Doc Searls’ article did not cover, but that it important for creating and maintaining support for keeping the internet a free and open system in the US. The concepts found at Extreme Democracy will need to be incorporated into the efforts to fight this legally. People interested in “saving the net” actually have a tremendous amount of organizing and collaborative tools available to them. The Extreme Democracy concepts give some practicle ideas for effectively using these tools

On the technological bypass front, I think the picture is not as bleak as it may appear on the surface. Mesh networks, combined with efforts to buy dark fiberare among many possibilities for creating inexpensive, ubiquitous, unfiltered broadband internet.

These two topics are actually interrelated, because a “bypassing” system will want to take into account the concepts of the internet as not just a transport system, but also a “-place” (marketplace, meetingplace, etc) and a publishing multi-medium. And it could be built considering the internet as a commons, the internet is, as Howard Rheingold puts it:

…a commons in the strict definition of a resource from which nobody can be excluded, and that it probably wouldn’t have enabled Yahoo or Google to make billionaires out of kids in dorm rooms if it had been otherwise: one can create lucrative private property within a commons.

“Bypassing” is not only a technological problem, it is a social dilemma.

One idea that has been floated around from time to time, and who’s time might be coming, is an internet that is owned by the users. Instead of paying a “carrier” for access to “pipes” that they control, you would be a shareholder in an unfiltered system. Each interested individual might micro-invest a small amount of money to create the fibre backbones and wireless meshnetworks. And, since it is in the interest of companies like Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, Ebay, and others to keep the internet an open place, perhaps they would be willing partners in such a venture? There are many possibilities here. What is needed is for people to continue to blog and discuss all of this. Those who are concerned about this issue also happen to be people who currently have the tools, knowldge, and resources to create an effective solution to these dilemmas. Let’s hope that we use them.