Internet on film: A kludgy relationship

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November movies
The “Twilight” sequel, “New Moon” hits the big screen, along with George Clooney in “The Men Who Stare at Goats” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and the apocalyptic “2012” and “The Road.”

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Whose pipes are these anyway?
By 1998 more of us were online, and since less of the Internet was unknown there was that much less to fear. Which means, God help us, the Internet became safe for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail,” a two-hour-long commercial for AOL, Starbucks and — through example — Barnes & Noble. At least writer-director Nora Ephron managed to make writing and sending e-mail visually interesting (no mean feat), and she did show the fun of flirting via this new medium; but I’d still like to see the version where ny152@aol.com turns out to be the fat hacker with long greasy hair. Just to see Meg Ryan’s reaction.

But if we didn’t have as much to fear from the Internet as we originally thought, the Internet still has a lot to fear from us.

It was created in a spirit of cooperation and democracy which is now being threatened by businessmen like AT&T’s CEO Ed Whitacre, who, in an interview with BusinessWeek last November, implied that it’s not enough for consumers to pay for ISPs and it’s not enough for host servers to pay for more bandwidth; he now wants each individual Web site to pay for consumer access. He wants money coming and going and coming again, and in doing so he will create what the Internet has never had: a hierarchy. “We and the cable companies have made an investment,” he told BusinessWeek, “and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

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I’m not a businessman. I’m not a computer geek either. When the Internet was in its early stages and money could be made from it, I wasn’t interested. Now that its origins are part of history, I’m fascinated. That’s how much of an idiot I am. Wherever money can’t be made, that’s where you’ll find me.

Ed Whitacre doesn’t have this problem. He reportedly made $17 million last year, with a pension of over $5 million-per-year waiting for him. AT&T reported a profit of over $4.7 billion in 2005. Now they want more.

Here’s the problem I have with these guys. There are people who create something and if they’re lucky they make money from it. Tim Berners-Lee, now a Sir, created the World Wide Web in 1989. I hope he made some money from this act of creation; he changed the world. Guys like Ed Whitacre, on the other hand, create little. They simply take an existing thing and try to squeeze more money out of it. It doesn’t matter if, in the act of squeezing, they ruin the thing, as long as money is extracted. The bankruptcy of our culture is embodied in the ascendancy of these guys.

So a fictional corporation tried to erase Sandra Bullock’s life. A fictional corporation tried to dump oil tankers in the ocean. If only real corporations thought that small.

Erik Lundegaard supports net neutrality. You can read more about it at: http://www.savetheinternet.com/.

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