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April 26, 2006

does the CBC hate net neutrality?

A Democrat-sponsored bill protecting net neutrality was rejected in committee today by a 34-22 vote. Said House committee has a Republican majority, so the amendment by Ed Markey (MA-D) was unlikely to make it out alive, but five Democrats - including Congressional Black Caucus members Edolphus Towns, Albert Wynn, and Bobby Rush still felt the need to cross the aisle and vote with the Republicans. Throw in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus' Charlie Gonzales and four out of five of the ATT Five are members of the Hill's civil right's caucuses. What gives?

What gives is that these four made the cynical and depressing calculation that black and Latino folks don't care about or follow telecom/internet regulation issues, giving them a free vote to toss the telecom lobby's way. Besides being gutless, this vote puts Towns, Wynn and Rush's constituencies at greater risk for higher internet bills and poorer service. Lots of folks have explained net neutrality better than I will be able to, but suffice to say that if telecoms are allowed to pin premium pricing schemes to the delivery of services they currently treat "neutrally" (delivering you this blog page vs. a video download vs. an e-commerce site vs...) black consumers will be among the first to get fucked.

That prediction isn't idle conjecture on my part, but a projection of current patterns in how telecom, cell, cable and information services are marketed to black audiences. After decades of being redlined and underserved, the African American market has become highly attractive on the thesis that we tend to spend heavily, first and freely on premium telecommunication services, and that where we go youngish, crossover audiences tend to follow. (Where you at, indeed.)

Advertisers and providers have all kinds of shiny jargon and sociology to account for these behaviors: we are "luxury conscious." African Americans "enjoy feature rich environments." We're "trendsetters." Black folks like and understand bling. What all this boils down to practically is that the media, advertising and telecom bizzes expect black folks to enthusiastically pay for any old "extra" shit that comes packaged as a premium, style or luxury add-on. In my experience, study after focus group after sales presentation has enshrined this counter-intuitive fact as ethnic marketing 101, and any rep worth their pillar of salt can toss off related factoids like how, compared to the average white cell phone customer, a demo-comparable (age, sex income level and so on) black cell customer will tend to sign up for more initial minutes or text messages or photo uploads. (Sure, they may dial it back after a few bills, but the initial deviation still makes for pretty spreadsheets.) The same goes for black new car buyers choosing between stereo systems, cable subscribers picking standard, bronze or gold plans, and, of course, no one needs me to rehash the long history of hijinks associated with high end sneakers, a story whose only silver lining is the near ubiquity of cheap knockoffs.

This counter-intuitive spending pattern (in so much as black people are simultaneously imagined as having less) is the dirty little secret of all black consumer media and no business plan proposing a black magazine, website, telecom, MVNO, cable channel or radio station is complete without it.

Which brings us to net neutrality. Do you imagine that in a post-net neutral world AOL or Time Warner Cable, for example, is going to deliver AOL Black Voices the same way they currently deliver competitor BlackPlanet.com? Or taken from another angle, imagine the epic buffets of pointless feature-sets, packaging hustles, and junk "premiums" that will be hawked by SBC in a post-net neutral world, the byzantine universe of hidden deals and associations. For-pay BET branded chat for the teens? Creflo Dollar paying to slow down TD Jake's sermon streams? Conglomerate A paying to stream crap music at superspeed while everyone else's beats crawl along or queue up at the entrance to the thin, slow pipes? These are precisely the kinds of scenarios that should inform the thinking of representatives like Towns, Wynn and Rush, but I guess that telephone money was just too good to pass up.

Posted by ebogjonson in next levelish, politricknal sciences, talking androids, on April 26, 2006 5:27 PM