Should We Question Who's Controlling Our Bandwidth?

So little of the stuff you read in the opinion pages of the daily newspapers is truly original thinking. Most of it is just a regurgitation of what's been said a million times before. So major kudos to Tim Wu for his piece in the New York Times entitled "OPEC 2.0."

It really got me thinking about something I hadn't previously thought about at all: Are we creating – or, have we already created – a new kind of OPEC that has a monopoly on how we get our information?

I highly recommend reading the article.

PublicAgenda.org readers are, of course, very interested in the free flow of information. So my question for you is: Should we be as suspicious of the motives of our bandwidth providers as we are of OPEC?

I am curious to know what the rest of America thinks about this issue. I doubt Americans are currently giving it a lot of thought, but how would they think about these issues if they were presented with this information? The Pew Internet & American Life Project does a lot of research on these kinds of topics, but I am not aware of any polling specifically exploring Americans knowledge of, or concerns about, who controls access to the Internet.

In truth, it is probably a topic that requires substantial public engagement rather than polling. It is too complex and unformed in people's thinking to start with a poll.

It would be great if a funder who is into exploring the Internet frontier would support a project in which Public Agenda helps Americans start thinking about the topic of "How should we decide who controls the Internet?"