Future of Music Coalition - Policy Day 2009 - Page 3

With each development of new technology there has been a time when it seemed it would save the world. Ben Scott, Policy Director of Free Press, put it best with a story of the advent of radio.  He points out how with each new technology, there are new opportunities for people to get involved with big media.  With newspapers, you had to have large distribution to make an impact.  When radio came along, talk of it in the '20s made it seem ideal for mass dialogue, removing barriers and limitations.  Everyone would have it and all would be empowered to speak out through it, similar to what's happened with the Internet over the past decade.  Once people realized you could make money with radio, guidelines and regulations were needed, which led to the creation of the FCC.  Once the FCC's rules were in place, the democratization and freedom of radio disappeared.  Skip to the 1940s when a new medium arrived — television.

And so on down the line — through TV, and cable, and on to the Internet. However, now is the time when regulators are starting to come in and try and build walls around the media and figure out how to fit it into a set of rules and regulations.

We can try to minimize the impact of these kinds of decisions, that the slight shifting of laws regulating communications practices won’t affect the way the world works. Sacha Meinrath of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation sees it in a much grander light.

“At this heart there is this epic battle taking place right now….and the fundamental question is if the new status quo will be a hierarchical command and control communication future, or a more decentralized, and participatory communications future. So the battles we are fighting here are nothing less than a war for the future of civil society, and the basic tenets of democracy.”

If we consider our ability to speak and communicate central to our future as a society, certainly the freedom of access and speech on the Internet is as crucial as Meinrath said. In the context of the panel, though, this kind of free access also becomes mixed up with creative issues, questions of how an artist should be able to work and share and express themselves.

Hank Schocklee, founder of Public Enemy, stressed the importance of access so that artists would have the means to express themselves, and avoid the corporate structures that often overwhelm creative work. Mike Petricone, of the Consumer Electronics Association agreed, saying “[Broadband] is the key enabling application for artists. You can reach a global marketplace, go around gatekeepers, and create a middle class marketplace. So for the artist community an ubiquitous, functioning, broadband system is a good thing...and it's important that we don't let the nay-sayers lock the Internet down.”

Article Author: Claire Marie Blaustein

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