This quote, attributed to Curt Schilling, a three-time World Series champion, sums up many aspects of sports as well as life in general. A person can certainly put the proverbial 110% effort into preparation and execution of a particular task, but then it’s out of their hands and the rest comes down to fate.
This week’s blog post assignment is about control in regard to media. According to a June 2021 article on The Motley Fool website, there are 6 main players now in the media landscape: Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Viacom CBS, Sony & Fox. All but Sony have several broadcast and cable networks. And Sony owns one of the big three record labels as well.
In last week’s lectures and reading assignments, I was surprised when reading the March 2021 article in the Washington Post, “Gatekeepers: These tech firms control what’s allowed online.” The story introduced me to what it called the tech stack – an illustration of the multiple entities involved in how information flows through the Internet. When thinking about it, I would have identified Facebook as a platform and Spectrum as my service provider, but I would not have mentioned the three layers in the middle. The article gave many examples of how the other layers work together as well to control what information is distributed: Parler having its cloud service shut down; PayPal and Apple Pay refusing to process payments from white supremacist sites; and GoDaddy terminating its hosting of far-right social networking services such as Gab.
When it comes to our personal freedoms online – what we watch, what we read and what we listen to – there is cause for concern. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act became law. It kept Internet service providers from being legally responsible for the content posted in the comments sections or chat rooms. At the time, it made perfect sense. How could America Online or similar companies monitor all of the chatter by its customers?
In February 2021, Consumer Reports posted a story about Section 230 at the 25-year mark of its existence: “What Congress’ Section 230 Debate Means for the Future of Online Speech.” The article focuses on the other side of Section 230, which allows the platforms to regulate any speech that it deems inappropriate. This means that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etcetera have control to take down what it wants to. The ominous part of the article mentions that these tech giants have control to dictate economic tides and perhaps even sway election results.
The biggest move in favor of people’s individual control may have come earlier this year, when a judge allowed California to begin enforcing the Net Neutrality law that was passed in 2018. According to this Associated Press article in February 2021 the telecommunications industry asked for the law to be blocked, however the judge denied the request. California Senator Scott Weiner stated after the judge’s ruling, “The internet is at the heart of modern life. We all should be able to decide for ourselves where we go on the internet and how we access information. We cannot allow big corporations to make those decisions for us.”
Thanks to net neutrality, the internet stays the way it has been since the beginning. Users have control of what they see, what they hear and what they read. Internet service providers cannot block or slow down certain websites based on content. Let’s hope that control remains on our side for decades and generations to come.
