INDEPENDENT MEDIA by Steve Anderson

At Fresh Hot Type, the after party for the Fresh Media Festival on October 24, local media arts group W2 provided a letterpress with which partygoers could experiment. The idea was that as DJs were spinning in the background, participants could creatively express themselves by using the letterpress, ink and paper. Not satisfied with what seemed like the natural limits of the medium, participants soon began writing words and expressions on both their own and each other’s bodies and acting out the words on the dance floor.

Big telecom companies like Telus like to scare policy makers by suggesting any open Internet requirements for Internet Service Providers will lead to “unintended consequences.” I, however, have taken to arguing just the opposite – that allowing ISPs to become gatekeepers and regulators of Internet usage has both intended and unintended negative consequences for innovation, online choice and free expression. Clearly, there are negative consequences to allowing an ISP to slow access to a radically democratic and innovative file sharing service like bittorent, which is still very much in an embryonic stage of development.

Participants at Fresh Hot Type

But now I think I may have got it all wrong; what we want most from the Internet is actually just that – unintended consequences. The original architects of the Internet neither expected nor intended, and couldn’t have even imagined, an Internet that would include bittorrent, Twitter, Skype, etc. They simply produced a neutral network where users could freely innovate and connect with one another. The best part about the Internet – user ingenuity, grassroots innovation and open collaboration – came not from the Internet’s architects or ISPs, but from what Jonathan Zittrain calls the “generativity” of the Internet.

According to Zittrain, generativity refers to a “system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences… Generativity pairs an input consisting of unfiltered contributions from diverse people and groups, who may or may not be working in concert, with the output of unanticipated change.”

We can flesh out generativity further in future columns, but in basic terms, a generative platform is one that is open, accessible, useful, flexible and easy to master.

The participants at Fresh Hot Type were able to generate new ways of interacting with the letterpress because we provided it as an open platform and didn’t squash their inventiveness when we saw what was happening. Like everyone else, we took joy in the generativity of the letterpress. Dancing body canvasses was the positive, yet unintended consequence, of the letterpress in the context of a dance party.

The explosion of innovation and collaboration unleashed by the open Internet is the creative expression that the Internet’s generative platform has provided. The big telecom companies did not initially intend to provide access to these unsanctioned services when they began selling access to the Internet. New, ground-up, online innovation is the unintended consequence that ISPs would like to avoid as they compete with ISP services like TV and phone services.

On October 22, the CRTC took an important step in the right direction by putting forward open Internet (“traffic management”) guidelines.

As it stands right now, however, ISPs have not yet been told to stop throttling access to the open Internet. Furthermore, under the current CRTC guidelines, the onus falls on the consumer to file a complaint and prove that an ISP is unjustly throttling traffic. It is unfair to force consumers to go head-to-head over and over again with some of the most powerful businesses in the country.

It’s time for Industry Minister Tony Clement and the Conservative party to join the other major parties by demanding that the CRTC conduct regular compliance audits of ISP traffic management practices. If Clement does the right thing here, we could have a truly open Internet before we know it.

Send an immediate letter to Tony Clement at http://saveournet.ca

Long live unintended consequences.

Steve Anderson is the national coordinator for the Campaign for Democratic Media. He contributed to Censored 2008 and Battleground: The Media, and has written for The Tyee, Toronto Star, Epoch Times and Adbusters. Reach him at:
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