WASHINGTON, DC — M2Z Networks, Inc. has a bold new business proposal – and it wants the federal government to help finance it. Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and Representative Chris Cannon think this is a brilliant expense of limited tax payer resources. After all, M2Z Networks wants to be a free, nationwide wireless broadband provider with zero adult content.“It’s really about a protected environment where things can happen and you feel comfortable, and part of the value you pay for is that safe environment,” M2Z CEO John Muleta kind of explained to the Salt Lake Tribune, adding that “In the broadband space you just effectively don’t have that.”
Muleta, a former FCC regulator himself, is hoping that he can convince the commission to give M2Z Networks a chunk of currently unused broadband, free of charge. In addition to the company’s conservative political allies, so-called “child-protection advocates” including the National Troopers Coalition, National PTA, and Internet Keep Safe Coalition have voiced their support for the plan.
Companies including Verizon and AT&T don’t think it’s such a great idea, however.
“The spectrum sought by M2Z must be auctioned and cannot simply be licensed to one entity for free,” Verizon’s attorneys insisted in a filing on the issue.
Muleta disagrees. According to him, the spectrum he wants is of no interest to anyone else – and besides, it’s all for a good cause: free bandwidth to those too poor or rural to afford a full service content provider, as well as free service to emergency personnel.
What consumers would get in exchange for the subsidy would be the right to purchase a $250 wireless modem and connect to the company’s signal free of charge and moving at six times the speed of dial-up – with “obscenity” nowhere to be found. Customers who’d like to toss a little money behind their access can do so for a monthly fee that would both earn them speeds 60 times as fast as dial-up and the right to see mature content. M2Z would make its money from premium subscriptions and ad rates. In return, it would pay 5-percent of its premium service sales to the federal government
While big wireless carriers fret about bandwidth handouts after seeing $14 billion spent during a recent auction, the Media Access Project points out that although the concept has merit, M2Z’s offered speeds are slow by today’s standards and that being asked to wait a decade for the network to be fully actualized is rather a long period of time to ask the government to invest in an experiment.
Although Google, Amazon, TiVo, and MySpace have committed collectively to funding $500 million worth of the network, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, John Morris, sees the trouble as having more to do with the company’s commitment to filtering. Any filtering authorized by the government would immediately be unconstitutional, Morris points out. Without funding, M2Z would be free to do as it wished, but the fact its hand is out and asking for public money means that it is walking a fine legal line.
“If this is the one single government-approved national broadband network, and it’s going to be available for free, and it’s government-sanctioned,” Morris warns, “then it looks like this is government-imposed censorship.”
