این سه فصل را (فصل 7،8،9) را فصل به فصل و با ذکر تمام تیترهایش(تاکید میکنم ذکر تمام تیترهایش) به انگلیسی روان خلاصه کن   CHAPTER SEVEN 

Internet Freedom from the Outside In
CRAIG AAR ON and TI m O THY KARR, Free Press, United States




MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 
Progress on any important issue will be impossible without changes to the policies, laws, and politics that created the media we have now. The only way to make such changes is by creating a broad, popular movement for media reform. To mobilize this movement, Free Press uses an outside-in approach. For its net neutrality cam- paign, which culminated with a historic victory at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in February 2015, Free Press mobilized hundreds of organiza- tional allies and millions of “outside” activists to sign petitions, call Congress, and attend FCC hearings and local rallies. Free Press combined its robust ﬁeld strategy with “inside” expertise—including a Washington-based team of lawyers and lob- byists—to compel policy-makers to side with the public interest. Whether working for Internet freedom in the United States or abroad, advocates won’t win the right policies without a symbiosis of ﬁeldwork and policy intelligence. While the ﬁght for net neutrality is far from over, the best long-term strategy for saving the Inter- net will be to work from the outside in.

On a cold Thursday morning in January 2014, a small group of advocates gath- ered outside the imposing ediﬁce of the FCC in Washington, DC. They opened the trunk of a red Ford Fusion parked nearby and began unloading about twenty white banker’s boxes. Within minutes, they had assembled a makeshift cardboard podium. Inside the boxes were more than a million signatures col- lected in just two weeks from people across the country.

100
 
Each person had signed on to an online letter demanding the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler protect net neutrality, the principle that ensures that the Internet remains open and free from discrimination by the large phone and cable com- panies that control broadband access for most Americans.
These petition deliveries were just the beginning of a year of Internet activ- ism that resulted in unprecedented public involvement in an issue before the FCC, unexpected popular attention on the once obscure issue of net neutrality, and a remarkable reversal that would eventually lead both the president of the United States and the chairman of the FCC to endorse the strongest public interest protections.
Net neutrality as an idea is but one part of a larger global movement of people ﬁghting for Internet freedom. It is a movement that includes democracy activists in Eastern Europe, Arab Spring protesters in the Middle East and North Africa, and dissident bloggers and “hacktivists” across Asia. In early 2012, more than ten million people mobilized online and oﬀ to defeat the SOPA/PIPA Web censorship legislation in the United States (Lee 2012). Activ- ists are using the open Internet to ﬁght unchecked spying and surveillance by the NSA and demand online privacy and free speech rights.
The Internet was designed to be an engine of disintermediation, free speech, and inclusion—a means by which anyone could route around the gatekeepers, build online communities, and share information. It opened the door for new forms of grassroots political organizing and gave smart online activists an impressive means to inﬂuence policies and shame bad actors.
With only a tiny fraction of ﬁnancial resources of our opponents, Internet freedom advocates struggle every day to preserve this openness. In response to the Internet freedom movement’s successes, industry has hired a phalanx of front groups to paint activists as extremists and doomsayers (Gustin 2010; Powell 2014). The fate of the Internet is best left in the hands of “experts,” they say, those think-tank analysts who are themselves often on the dole of powerful cable and telephone companies (Ekran 2014). 
For their part, the empires of companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable were built not on innovation, free speech, and inclu- sion, but on control of markets and squelching new competition. Despite what their PR oﬃces would like us to believe, their armies of lobbyists earn their keep by winning anticompetitive legislation and exclusive government franchises while stiﬂing the entry of new applications and services on their networks.
And it’s quite an army. The three largest Internet service providers—Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast—have spent more than $500 million dollars on lobbyists and an additional $185 million in campaign contributions over the past twenty- ﬁve years.  This corporate largesse has delivered a return on investment. The past three decades of media policymaking is a story of growing consolidation of media power into the hands of a very few.
 
Essential to their success is the corruption of the political process and an ever-revolving door between the regulators and the regulated. Of the twenty- six FCC commissioners and chairs to have served at the agency between 1980 and the end of 2012, at least twenty-one have gone on to work—as an employee, consultant, lobbyist, lawyer, or paid board member—for corpora- tions in industries they were in oﬃce to regulate. Michael Powell who served as FCC chairman from 2001 until 2005 is now the top lobbyist for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. In 2011, Meredith Atwell Baker left her job as FCC commissioner for a top lobbying position at Comcast. She announced her transition just four months after voting to approve the cable giant’s takeover of NBC (Stearns 2011).
This is the challenge facing any Internet freedom ﬁghter. While we are far from pinning down this many-tentacled beast, we believe that outside-in orga- nizing is the best strategy to undo the damage caused by a generation of insidious corporate inﬂuence over media policy. It is a strategy that can yield results not just in Washington but also with any government that is struc- tured—at least nominally—to be responsive to public input. Outside-in orga- nizing is an approach that has allowed us to use the Internet to save the Internet. This conﬂuence of the medium and the message give new leverage to the ﬁght against seemingly insurmountable odds.

OPPOSING FOR CES 
The history of the Internet has been a history of openness and innovation as well as a history of steady encroachment on the fundamental ideas underlying the Internet’s evolution.
It has been twenty-ﬁve years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee designed an open protocol for the World Wide Web. It is this innovation—and the end-to-end network engineering principle put in place by other Internet founders like Vint Cerf—that served as catalysts for the Internet’s explosive growth (Jakma 2011). These foundations had far-reaching political implications, favoring systems that are more decentralized and democratic, promoting universal access to information and amplifying dissident voices. Without the inherent protections an open Internet oﬀers, political voices that lack a big-money megaphone will be drowned out.
It is an approach that has also given us a truly free marketplace of ideas where even the smallest entrepreneur can theoretically compete with giant corpora- tions. (Would we have many of the Internet’s most innovative businesses—like Twitter, YouTube, or Etsy—had they been unable to enter the market on a level playing ﬁeld?).
The alternate history of the Internet is one of steady encroachment on these fundamental ideas by gatekeeper media. In the United States, companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have managed to chip away at the rules that
 
were put in place to protect openness. Their goal is to impose a gatekeeper business model on content—anything that allows Internet service providers to squeeze more proﬁt out of the rush of data.
At the center of the tug-of-war over the Internet is the issue of net neutrality. Should Internet users’ rights to communicate without interference be protected under the law? Or should Internet access providers be able to treat the network and the content that ﬂows across it as theirs to censor and exploit?

THE OUT SIDEINSIDE CHALLENGE 
Since its founding ten years ago, Free Press has taken up the cause of media users of every stripe. The net neutrality battle has taken center stage in our work. Our challenge in the face of such institutional corruption is to shame those in Washington who sell their inﬂuence to the highest bidder while ampli- fying the public voice in key policy debates.
To accomplish this we had to frame the debate correctly. The battle for net neutrality was not a clash of corporate titans and their lobbyists—even if the mainstream media often painted it as a standoﬀ between Google and AT&T. The real story was one of a new political movement pitting the interests of all Internet users against the narrow concerns of a handful of wealthy and politi- cally inﬂuential corporate elites (see, for example, Labaton [2007] for a jour- nalist using the Clash of Titans frame). Although net neutrality advocates were vastly outspent and outmanned in the halls of power, industry could not kill the power of an engaged, passionate, and connected public.
Our outside-in approach on net neutrality relied upon the expertise and credibility of Free Press “inside” experts—lawyers, researchers and advocates— while simultaneously mobilizing hundreds of organizational allies and millions of “outside” activists to sign petitions, call Congress, and attend FCC hearings and local rallies from Minneapolis to Mountain View.
Employing this strategy for net neutrality seems so obvious in some respects that it’s amazing how often it is not used. Insiders regularly fail to engage the public on key issues and then wonder why people never seem to care. And popular ideas fail to take root in Washington because there’s nobody on the inside making the case—or worse, the appointed insiders are actively working against the interest of their constituents.
The key is establishing a symbiosis. The insiders need the threat of a public outcry to get a seat at the table. But hundreds of thousands of calls and letters to Congress and the FCC are worthless without the inside knowledge to target the right decision-makers at the right time. You need to strike a balance between the credibility of the policy experts and the creativity of the ﬁeld.
Though vastly outnumbered on Capitol Hill—and largely absent at industry cocktail parties at campaign fundraisers—Free Press has relied on a small group of advocates and allies to represent us in Washington. We work with a network
 
of social justice and civil liberties allies to connect with key congressional staﬀ- ers and educate “grasstops” leaders, and conduct independent research and analysis. We collaborated closely with legal scholars such as Columbia’s Tim Wu, and Harvard University’s Susan Crawford, and Lawrence Lessig, whose widely inﬂuential writing on open networks, universal access and free culture have captivated a generation of Internet advocates.
The campaign insiders also reached out to potential industry allies. Internet “edge” companies—including Google, Amazon, and Netﬂix—had formed the Open Internet Coalition in 2006, but its corporate members often got cold feet when facing pressure from Capitol Hill. While at times working on legisla- tive strategy alongside the Internet companies that supported net neutrality, Free Press never took their money. As tempting as it might have been to tap into the corporate coﬀers, it was more important to remain independent. One needed only to look at our opponents to see what happened when legitimate groups got coopted by corporate cash.
Insiders are often skittish about grassroots eﬀorts—largely because they can’t control them. The public outreach—spearheaded by Free Press, MoveOn.org, CREDO Action, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, and other groups— has helped ﬁnd remarkable and genuine local stories that showed how taking away net neutrality would harm everyday people and small businesses. By letting the grassroots speak for themselves we managed to overcome the reluc- tance of some Washington, DC, decision-makers, who view the larger, public- interest advocacy groups as just another interested party.

SET TING THE STA G E FOR    
The story of 2014 was of all these overlapping networks coalescing into a remarkable campaign. Online, a massive Internet slowdown was joined by forty thousand websites, including such major platforms as Netﬂix, Tumblr, and Etsy. All told, more than four million people ﬁled oﬃcial comments with the FCC—more than on any other issue in the agency’s history. Oﬄine, the highlights included repeated rallies outside the FCC and at Obama fundrais- ers, people camping out on the FCC’s doorstep, enormous video billboards erected in Washington, DC, packed public hearings across the country, and creative street theater. This upsurge in activism attracted the attention of the press and entered popular culture through the viral-video rant of HBO’s John Oliver.
It was the activists who moved the companies and the politicians, not the other way around. The activists created the political space in which President Obama could step into the bully pulpit to push for the strongest net neutral- ity protections. And that gave FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler the room to change his mind. On February 26, 2015, the FCC voted to protect net neutral-
 
ity and reclassify broadband under Title II of the Communications Act. Wheeler, who was interrupted by multiple standing ovations, called it “the proudest day of my public policy life” (Kang and Fung 2015).
This moment was ten years in the making and marks the biggest win ever for the public interest at the FCC. Net neutrality as an issue has become the gate- way to Internet freedom activism on several related fronts, including opposition to industry mergers like the scuttled deal between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the ﬁght for universal, aﬀordable Internet access, online privacy, and free speech both domestically and on a global scale. Our goal has never been about getting faster movie downloads or new gadgets. The ﬁght for Internet freedom at its core is about democracy—it is about ensuring that citizens have the infor- mation they need to hold their leaders accountable and the tools to have an impact on the decisions shaping their lives. That is why saving the Internet is so important: It might be our best—and last—chance to make an end-run around the mainstream media gatekeepers. But the Internet won’t reach this promise if we don’t demand a seat at the table where decisions about its future are being made. And the only way to get that seat is from the outside-in.



CHAPTER EIGHT 

A Victory for Digital Justice
j OSHU A BR EITBART , Formerly New America’s Open Technology Institute, United States



MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 
When Congress created the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) in 2009, the media reform movement marked it as a major, albeit partial victory. The nonproﬁt Allied Media Projects in Detroit and Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia responded to this opportunity by building digital justice coalitions with groups focused on housing, workers’ rights, youth, education, and environmental jus- tice that had not worked on the digital divide in the past. The Open Technology Institute supported these innovative, visionary eﬀorts with technical and policy expertise, a network of researchers, and a commitment to enduring partnerships. As a program, BTOP provided an opportunity for an enduring impact on broadband in the United States. In Philadelphia and Detroit, the coalitions used the grant- seeking process to craft visions for how the Internet could better serve their respective communities, and turned these visions into successful proposals for the newly avail- able BTOP grant funds. With the grants, the local communities formed relation- ships, developed skills, and built infrastructure with which to take on new challenges. The digital justice coalitions proved a highly eﬀective strategy for trans- forming the local digital ecosystem in response to the conditions created by the BTOP.

In 2009, digital justice coalitions in Detroit and Philadelphia seized an oppor- tunity to turn a temporary federal program into a lasting transformation of the Internet’s role in their local communities.
 
When Congress included $7.2 billion for broadband access and adoption in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (ARRA), the media reform movement marked it as a major, but partial victory. It was a victory because ARRA funded a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) that marked a dramatic shift marked a dramatic shift in policy from a reliance on the private market to a more active role for the government in extending the beneﬁts of the Internet to everyone across the United States; only a partial victory, though, because the hard work of devising and enacting a new approach to the Internet remained.
No longer were we limited to constraining the harm the federal government might cause; we could spend public dollars directly on making the Internet more useful and accessible for those who had previously been shut out from its beneﬁts. To do this, we had to engage groups that had never before worked on media policy issues. While past media reform campaigns called on people to make a small investment of time in the form of a call to Congress or a com- ment to the FCC, we needed to generate multiple, high quality, innovative federal grant proposals, which analysts at the Open Technology Institute (OTI, then known as the Open Technology Initiative) estimated would take a skilled team of four or ﬁve people approximately 240 to 250 hours to complete (New America Foundation 2009).

FORMING DIGITAL JUSTICE CO ALITIONS 
Allied Media Projects (AMP) in Detroit and Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in Philadelphia responded to this opportunity by building digital justice coalitions with groups focused on housing, workers’ rights, youth, education, and environmental justice that had not worked on the digital divide in the past. The coalitions crafted visions for how the Internet could better serve their respective communities, and planned to turn these visions into successful proposals for the newly available federal funds (MMP 2009).
OTI was well positioned to support these innovative, visionary eﬀorts with technical and policy expertise, a network of researchers and a commitment to enduring partnerships. OTI provided an organizing roadmap for Philadelphia based on an analysis of the city’s previous major attempt at expanding broad- band connectivity and then carried the idea of starting a digital justice coalition (DJC) to Detroit (Breitbart, Lakshmipathy, and Meinrath 2007). AMP and MMP used the annual Allied Media Conference in Detroit to share lessons directly and connect with other BTOP hopefuls.
As we translated these visions into the immediate context of the new federal policy, OTI and our partners wanted the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to aﬃrm multimedia production as an essential component of digital literacy, in addition to basic skills like search and e-mail. We also sought to have nontraditional anchor institutions included as
 
hosts of computer centers, along with the public libraries and community col- leges that were referenced in the Recovery Act (US Congress 2009).
When NTIA approved our grant proposals and implemented programs along these lines, it set an important precedent of government support for this type of community media production as an economic development strategy and as a new vision of public media. More importantly, we saw how it allowed people to engage as full authors from places where they already had commu- nity support. Instead of just adopting broadband as individuals, whole com- munities could go online together so the Internet would be a welcoming enhancement to their oﬄine lives.
This media reform victory oﬀers lessons beyond Internet policy for anyone hoping to build cross-sector coalitions and reach traditionally underserved groups with new technology. There were four phases to this campaign: (1) shap- ing the funding program; (2) winning funds for exemplary, innovative projects;
(3) implementation, including documentation and evaluation; and (4) com- municating and building on the results of the implementation.
As Congress began consideration of the Recovery Act, OTI worked with other public interest groups in Washington, DC, to shape the broadband com- ponent of the bill to support adoption and public computer centers, and ensure that community organizations could be eligible for grant funding. The statu- tory language left a lot of discretion to the implementing agencies: the Rural Utility Service, a part of the US Department of Agriculture, and NTIA, a division of the Department of Commerce.
The NTIA’s program, known as the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), included funds for mapping current broadband availability and for building new infrastructure, and for two other areas focused on encouraging use of the technology through “sustainable broadband adoption” activities and “public computer centers.” Once the legislation was passed, we focused our attention on these grant programs as the more accessible opportu- nity for smaller organizations, and the only one for groups in urban areas.

PURSUING A BR OA D VISION 
As we moved into the second phase of outreach to potential applicants, we gathered many ideas from people as to how BTOP could most beneﬁt their communities. After the ﬁrst grant opening, the NTIA issued a request for comments on how it should administer subsequent rounds of the program. We submitted written comments in November 2009 with more than two dozen recommendations endorsed by more than forty organizations. We pro- posed an expansive vision of what the program could support. In our com- ments, we encouraged a broader deﬁnition of community anchor institution, cited the importance of digital media and social media skills for broadband adoption, and proposed the use of publicly available data like unemployment
 
and poverty rates to determine eligibility for BTOP funds, rather than hard- to-ﬁnd broadband adoption rates as NTIA had required.
We faced another challenge in pursuing a broad, community-based vision of broadband expansion: Many hard-to-reach groups did not know the program existed. We set up a broadband stimulus resource library where we oﬀered guides to each funding stream as well as a Primer on Federal Internet Funding in July 2009 that we produced with People’s Production House, a community media organization (OTI and People’s Production House 2009). The single page, printed front and back in black and white and folded into a small booklet, included bullet points with background information and basic guidance for groups to determine whether this opportunity was right for them. We used this as a handout at a series of strategic discussions titled “A Healthy Digital Ecology: Creating a Community Vision for Federal Internet Funding” across multiple national conferences that OTI organized with a range of media reform and media justice organizations throughout summer 2009.
MMP and AMP, both of which emphasize media production in their mis- sions, organized digital justice coalitions in their cities, connecting media education and technology groups with a range of social justice organizations and community anchor institutions. The coalitions bridged a gulf in their respective communities between those who understood the potential of broadband as an organizing tool and the organizers of communities that did not use broadband. These coalitions had already identiﬁed BTOP as an orga- nizing opportunity. OTI provided expertise in the federal policy guidelines and how the program was playing out across the country.

INV OLVING THE COMMUNIT Y
The digital justice coalitions were grassroots and composed of experts in not having access to technology, either through their personal experience or from their immediate constituents. The coalitions formulated principles to guide their work and fashioned visions for the role of broadband in their communi- ties that put a potential BTOP proposal in a broader context (Detroit Digital Justice Coalition 2009). To inform their proposals, the digital justice coalitions adopted participatory techniques from community organizing and urban plan- ning. Public fora were discussion based, with small breakouts. The Detroit Digital Justice Coalition held neighborhood technology fairs called DiscoTechs (short for “discovering technology”) that served as both a teaching opportunity and a form of participatory research (Breitbart 2012). Moreover, even if the had not led to a winning proposal, the public forums and DiscoTechs expanded the coalitions and enhanced the shared community vision.
The coalitions in Philadelphia and Detroit took distinct paths, as shaped by their local conditions. In Philadelphia, the coalition spurred the city govern-
 
ment and large institutions to action, and with its members ultimately taking part in applications from the City of Philadelphia and the Greater Philadelphia Urban Aﬀairs Coalition. The Detroit group, operating in a city where local government and most major institutions had failed residents, retained its iden- tity as the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition and was able to carve out the com- ponents for Detroit in twin statewide proposals from Michigan State University. Both coalitions were successful in winning funds for their visions of broad- band adoption and public computer centers. The Philadelphia Freedom Rings Partnership (FRP) was awarded $11.8 million for broadband adoption and $6.4 million for computer centers. Michigan State University, whose statewide pro- posals included the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, received $5.2 million for
adoption and $6.1 for centers.
Winning the grants brought us both funding and new challenges as we moved into the implementation phase. These projects—cross-sector coalitions with novel teaching programs and new computer labs—were inherently ambitious. The coalitions had built themselves up through long hours and a lot of grit, through which a relatively small group of leaders came to know each other rather well. Receiving the grants and scaling up meant moving from hard-won relation- ships and no money to new relationships and a lot of money. Having a promi- nent lead organization on the proposals was essential to win the grant and manage the federal reporting requirements, but in practice this also meant translating the horizontal relationships of the organizing coalitions into hierar- chical relationships of prime grant recipients, subrecipients, and subcontractors. OTI moved from being policy advocates to instigators to grant writers to contracted evaluators, which required balancing independence, subordination, and evangelizing for the shared (yet evolving) vision. Once the money was awarded, we moved quickly to implement the projects. Grant recipients had to proceed with hiring, contracting, procurement, reﬁnements to the program design and the development of an evaluation framework in parallel. Some of the partners were doubling or tripling their budgets and staﬀ sizes almost over- night. Finding staﬀ with the requisite skills, cultural competence and shared vision was itself a challenge to implementation. The Recovery Act was desig- nated as economic stimulus and there was both political pressure and require- ments in the grant to act fast. These pressures also made it hard to build
relationships across grant programs in diﬀerent locations.
The vision of these programs as locally deﬁned—eschewing a formulaic approach to teaching basic digital literacy and placing computer centers in traditional institutions—meant local partners had to ﬁgure a lot of things out for themselves. In practice, this ambition meant triple the work: the baseline set of organizational and educational activities that one would expect, plus a steady cycle of evaluation and iteration, and regularly having to make the case for your methods to the funder and other traditional actors in the ﬁeld.
 
DOCUMENTING THE SUCCESSES 

OTI and partners had to ﬁgure out how to document and communicate the impact of the digital justice coalitions’ innovative approaches. We did not want to rely on the accepted indicators of skill acquisition, new broadband subscriptions, and computer center use, which are in and of themselves rather diﬃcult to track across multiple programs using separate curricula to tackle various barriers among diﬀerent populations. Those metrics did not fully reﬂect our goals or values. We developed new indicators to document the important role of personal and institutional networks in facilitating broad- band adoption and how these relationships could sustain these impacts in the form of “durable social infrastructure” (Breitbart 2013).
In Philadelphia, OTI’s evaluation identiﬁed “the FRP’s successful approach to embedding digital literacy and public computer access in existing community- based and social service networks” (Gangadharan, Carolan, and Chan 2013). We showed how the people and institutions in these networks built relationships that led to “individuals [using] broadband technologies in settings that they ﬁnd most appropriate to their personal needs and contexts” (ibid.). We collected a wealth of data on how this approach and these relationships make the Internet relevant and useful for those it had previously underserved.
The Detroit Digital Justice Coalition built networks of teachers, youth, and artists and trained them to use media production and web development for organizing, education, and economic development. The lead groups in Detroit promulgated the use of the detroitfuture hashtag on Twitter among all pro- gram participants as a way to collaboratively develop an online narrative about Detroit that would be attractive for new broadband users. OTI archived this crowdsourced program documentation to analyze the ripple eﬀects of the trainings and identify the expanding social networks of the program (Breitbart, Byrum, and Bullen 2014).
OTI was able to move these insights into the mainstream of academic and policy discourse on broadband adoption. OTI convened a consortium of researchers to discuss “meaningful metrics for broadband adoption” in April 2012 and published the resulting papers in a peer reviewed special section of the International Journal of Communications (Gangadharan and Byrum 2012). NTIA drew heavily on this framework in a discussion about establishing com- mon metrics for broadband adoption at the close of BTOP in 2014 (National Telecommunications and Information Administration 2014).
The Detroit Digital Justice Coalition continues to work with DiscoTechs, focusing on housing and other pressing issues for the city. OTI and AMP developed a concept of digital stewardship and a related training program that emphasizes community control of communications infrastructure, teaching neighborhood residents to build their own wireless networks.
 
The BTOP money has come and gone. As a program, it was ﬂeeting, but it provided an opportunity for an enduring impact on broadband in the United States. In Philadelphia and Detroit, we were able to use the grant-seeking process as a vehicle for visioning and organizing, and for bringing new voices and audi- ences into the conversation about our shared digital future. With the grants, the local communities formed relationships, developed skills and built infrastructure (in the form of the computer centers) with which to take on new challenges, whether transforming the Internet or using the technology to improve their cities in other vital ways. The digital justice coalitions proved a highly eﬀective strategy for transforming the local digital ecosystem in response to the conditions created by the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.



CHAPTER  NINE 

Working Toward an Open Connected Future
DAv ID CHRIST O p HER, OpenMedia, Canada


MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 
The Internet won’t save itself. And no single organization can save it either. That is why everything OpenMedia does is about placing citizens at the heart of digital policy. Our digital future is just too important to be left to industry lobbyists and government bureaucrats. OpenMedia engages, educates, and empowers people through long-term citizen-driven campaigns. For this, it is important to ensure that citizen voices are at the heart of the debate. We ensure citizens can have their say through accessible online actions, innovative participatory tools, and through Internet Town Halls and other events.
Having gathered citizen input, we do our utmost to make sure those voices are heard at the heart of government. We do so by appearing at regulatory proceedings, meeting with politicians, creating online tools that make it easy for citizens to take part in regulatory processes, and by leveraging media coverage to encourage decision-makers to listen to citizens. Working with Canadians, OpenMedia has developed crowd-sourced, informed, in-depth research that shapes our policy plans. This approach is having a real impact and has led to a signiﬁcant improvement in recent years in terms of how the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunica- tions Commission (CRTC) listens to Canadians.

Imagine it is the year 2020 and you’ve been having a frustrating day. You’ve just been stopped at the border—the US guard wouldn’t tell you why, but you guess it is because of something you said or did online recently. They collect so

much data on your everyday life these days that it’s diﬃcult to know what, or why they red-ﬂagged you. It’s been happening to a lot of your friends recently too (Bridge 2011).
Returning home, you log on to your Internet account. It’s costing you over two hundred Canadian dollars a month for this, and some days you wonder why you bother. You still enjoy connecting with people, but so much content is oﬀ limits nowadays that your Internet is feeling more and more like cable TV (Isaacson 2014). That extra twenty-dollar monthly fee to access Facebook still annoys you—and you just can’t ﬁnd the money needed to access online news content other than from your sensationalist local TV station. At least that sta- tion comes as part of your Internet package because it is owned by your pro- vider—but to access the BBC would be an extra twenty-ﬁve dollars a month, and your provider blocks access to other online news portals completely.
Checking your e-mail, you discover a threatening letter (Brown 2013) from a US media giant. It seems to have something to do with a song your six-year-old niece accidentally downloaded when she visited a few months ago. The e-mail warns that under copyright rules negotiated under a previous Trans Paciﬁc Partnership, you will be kicked oﬀ the Internet entirely if it happens again (Desjardins 2013), and now you’ve got to pay an extortionate ﬁne to avoid getting taken to court.
At the same time, you are acutely aware that storing everything everyone says or does online in giant government databases comes at a cost to taxpayers. And you’re constantly worried that you’ll be the victim of a massive leak of your private data (Bennett 2014)—it seems the government just can’t keep anything secure.
You fondly remember the good old days, where you could read and connect privately with whoever you wanted online. It hasn’t been like that for years— not since those old net neutrality rules were struck down and your Internet provider started blocking or charging extra for content it didn’t own. And you have no option outside the high-cost Big Telecom Internet providers since they succeeded in blocking you from more aﬀordable, independent services. You wonder why you didn’t make more of a fuss about that at the time.
Does all this sound terrifying? Thankfully, we are still some way oﬀ from this dystopian vision of the future. But we are already on a very slippery slope and this is exactly what the Internet could look like in a few years if citizens step back and leave digital policy to telecom lobbyists and spy agency bureaucrats. OpenMedia exists to stop this from happening—it is an award-winning community-based organization that safeguards the possibilities of the open Internet. We work toward informed and participatory digital policy by engag-
ing hundreds of thousands of people in protecting our online rights.
We do this work because digital policy aﬀects each and every one of us. Our high cell phone bills are holding back our economy and Canada as a whole. Mass surveillance of law-abiding citizens has grown secretive, expensive, and
 
out-of-control—stiﬂing free speech in Canada and overseas. And supposed trade deals negotiated behind closed doors contain extreme Internet censorship rules that would seriously undermine citizens’ ability to communicate freely online.
If we stood back and did nothing then at best we’d end up with an Internet that was far more expensive, locked down, censored, and policed. And, if recent challenges in the United States to net neutrality are anything to go by, we may not even have an Internet at all—at least not as we know it today. That’s why, at OpenMedia, we work for digital policies that make sense for all users of the Internet—policies that help build the open, connected society we all deserve.

CASE STUD Y OF A SUCCESSFUL REFORM STRATEGY 
Our campaign on reshaping Canadian wireless policy oﬀers a compelling example of how the OpenMedia community works to bring about positive change. Canadians pay some of the highest prices in the industrialized world for often patchy and unreliable wireless service. This has been conﬁrmed time and again by independent reports (Christopher 2013). Many Canadians have no choice but to pay the high prices on oﬀer by the Big Three: Bell, Rogers, and Telus. These three providers control over 90 percent of the market, meaning many Canadians have no independent options whatsoever.
In January 2012, we launched the “Stop the Squeeze” campaign, which urged Canadians to speak out against the Big Three’s near-oligopoly. As part of this campaign we launched an online petition—along with videos, post- ers, and viral share images—to equip Canadians with the tools needed to speak up and pressure decision-makers. Over sixty-ﬁve thousand Canadians took part and in October 2012 the CRTC announced a public consultation to create new national rules for wireless services. At OpenMedia we wanted to make sure that these reﬂected the lived realities of Canadian cell phone users. We created a new online tool to enable Canadians to share their cell phone horror stories about the eﬀect high wireless prices and poor service had on their daily lives.
Over three thousand submissions were received through this campaign— some of which consisted of multiple pages detailing remarkable mistreatment at the hands of the Big Three. A common complaint was from Canadians returning home after trips to the United States or overseas to receive staggering bills for roaming charges. This citizen input was used to create a crowdsourced report entitled Time for an Upgrade (OpenMedia 2013) that reﬂected how Canadians wanted to see the wireless market reformed. During a crowdsourced presentation to the CRTC, the key themes of this report were reinforced: lower prices, greater choice, and better service. Canadians were kept informed via live tweets and online updates from the CRTC hearing.
 
OpenMedia focused on making the case that any new wireless code of conduct must be grounded in the evidence-based realities that our campaign had high- lighted. In June 2013 this work paid oﬀ—the CRTC announced a broadly posi- tive new set of customer protection rules (Rennie 2013) that capped data roaming rates, shortened contracts, and made it easier to switch to a new provider.
By this time, it seemed that decision-makers were starting to listen to Cana- dians but there was still a long way to go. Despite these new customer protec- tions, independent reports revealed that wireless prices were still increasing at thirteen times the rate of inﬂation (CNW 2013). Canadians were also con- cerned about attempts by large telecom providers such as Rogers and Telus to take over scarce wireless spectrum resources that had been set aside for inde- pendent providers.
As focus shifted from customer protections to the need for greater wireless choice, over forty leading Canadian innovators and entrepreneurs spoke out to tell Industry Canada that high prices were stiﬂing job creation and holding Canada’s economy back. Responding to this pressure, the government announced new rules (Industry Canada 2013) to help prevent the Big Three from taking over independent providers.
With a new industry minister, James Moore, taking oﬃce we encouraged Canadians to send a message asking him to stop the Big Three acting as gate- keepers to resources that were essential for Canada’s economy. We underlined the need for the government to listen to Canadians, whose crowdsourced roadmap called for opening the wireless networks to deliver real aﬀordability and choice. Once again, citizen pressure delivered results, with the new indus- try minister promising to take modest steps to ensure independent providers could access wireless networks at an aﬀordable rate (Market Wired 2013), along with ﬁnancial penalties for telecom giants who break the rules. Notably, the government has eﬀectively staked its reputation on delivering “more choice and lower prices”—even launching a government website and a TV ad cam- paign to underline this goal. This would never have happened without citizens speaking out en masse and working together to provide a positive roadmap for policy change.

THE INTERNET IS  KE Y TO  B UILDING A PA RTICIPATORY SHARED SOCIET Y
OpenMedia has seen again and again that when people speak up en masse, it really does make a diﬀerence—delivering real results and positive change. The common theme with all our successful campaigns is our emphasis on citizen participation. Our community is placed at the heart of everything OpenMedia does—whether that is crowdsourcing reports, policy plans, presentations, and even meetings with government ministers.
 
When designed well, OpenMedia’s campaigns eﬀectively act as platforms for broad-based citizen engagement and collaboration. It is important to ensure that citizens play the key role in shaping campaigns, from messaging and tactics all the way to long-term policy solutions. Time after time, it is citizens’ decisions to participate in campaigns that has ultimately led to their success. Together, our growing community has accomplished some remarkable things in a short period of time—whether overturning invasive government spying schemes or stopping pans to install a pay meter on the Internet.
Sadly, the need for OpenMedia’s work has not diminished. Eﬀorts to spy on private online activity, to censor the Internet, and to price-gouge Canadians on their monthly Internet bills make clear that the Internet continues to need people who are willing to work to defend it. By coming together online, citi- zens are demonstrating why the Internet is key to a future where collaboration and participation are hallmarks of our democracy. We are really just beginning to explore the Internet’s potential for building a democracy that truly responds to citizens’ needs. With threats to the Internet intensifying, it seems that we are at a tipping point: Either we stand back and let leaders, bureaucrats, and lob- byists tip us back into disempowerment, or we step forward to build a partici- patory shared future that works for all of us.