iPower predicts the death of the Internet

Is the Internet going the way of the dodo?  It is if you ask iPower, the Belgian filmmaker-activist group whose "Athene" YouTube show I wrote about a few weeks ago.  In a video that became the number one story on Digg yesterday and is today one of YouTube's most viewed, the group claimed it had an inside source at a major telecommunications company who told them that the telco industry was colluding on a plan to make the Internet subscription-based, kind of like cable TV. You'd pay a standard fee for your 'basic' sites--the high profile, mainstream sites that everyone uses, and would have to pay extra to access the little guys.

According to iPower's apocalyptic vision, the new paradigm would obliterate net neutrality--and the Internet as we know it, because once you put a tiered system in place, most users would choose not to pay extra for the non-mainstream stuff, and those sites would be extincted.

Warning: this video is long.  But you can get the basic idea in the first couple of minutes.  Incidentally, Tania's cleavage is a central part of iPower's publicity strategy.

Digg commenters cried foul on iPower's scandalous and unsourced claims. If the telecommunications companies were making back room plans to gut the Internet, people wrote, that would certainly be an antitrust violation. Second, there's an entire sector of companies whose raison d'etre is to innovate online--if they got their access revoked, a big fat slice of the economy would go poof. Take a site like Google, which is built to help users navigate a limitless Web. But if the Web was just a few hundred (or a few thousand) sites--a search engine as powerful as Google would be pointless.

So iPower's claim doesn't really add up. I spoke to Reese Leysen, one of iPower's members, and he swore that a high-level contact at one of the companies told him it was so. I'm tempted to believe Leysen since he's been a straight shooter before, but as is often the case with secrets, whatever secondhand truth he was handed probably got further muddled in translation. 

It seems plausible that the businesses that control the Internet might be having conversations about a next generation profit model--which might include ways they can decide which sites get to use their networks. It's an old prediction that without net neutrality laws, the big, high-traffic Web businesses would get the royal treatment--a sort of HOV lane on the Internet highway--and everyone else would fight for the scraps of bandwidth left over. But in a way, that's sort of what iPower is predicting, even if their specifics are off. The details of a nonneutral Internet don't matter as much as the big picture: once you make the net a pay-for-play system, it stops being a medium and starts being a market.