Ten years ago this week, Bill Clinton signed into law one of the biggest corporate ripoffs in American history. It was called the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The Washington politicians, along with the CEOs of the big media and telephone companies and their army of lobbyists, all promised a new era of low-cost information and entertainment for every American.

The new law, Clinton said, would "stimulate investment, promote competition" and "provide access for all citizens to the information superhighway" by getting rid of cumbersome government regulation.

Ten years later, we have scores of new-fangled gadgets that few of us imagined back then - cell phones that take photos, BlackBerries, iPods that download video, satellite radios, DVD players and digital TVs.

We have the local phone company offering us cable television service and the local cable company offering phone service, and all of them offering us broadband Internet service.

Last month in Massapequa Park, L.I., Verizon rolled out FiOS, its first cable television service in this state.

But the only thing that remains constant in this dizzying digital age is that everything costs more - even the old-fashioned phone and cable service we used to get.

Right now, as you read these words, the telecommunications lobbyists are scurrying around the halls of Congress and every state capitol in the land, scheming to pull off yet another huge ripoff under the banner of freedom and competition.

This time they want to steal the Internet itself. They want to grab the most important communications tool of our age right out from under the American people. Or at least they want to privatize access to it and charge the highest-possible toll for anyone to get on the highway's on-ramps.

In attempting this, they want all of us to forget that from the 1960s to the 1980s, American taxpayers financed the development of the Internet through grants to various university scientists from the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.

Only when the Internet became a viable network did private companies move in to exploit it for profit.

Now the big phone and cable companies, the same ones that already control the communications pipelines into our homes, want to create new classes and tiers of service on the Internet.

Platinum service for the richest customers to download video and data. Cheaper gold and bronze service for the middle and working class. And when it comes to poor neighborhoods, some companies are already practicing digital redlining and not even providing broadband service.

I was reminded of just how unfair this is a few weeks ago when I visited my oldest granddaughter, Christina, in Philadelphia.

Because she's a high school senior and getting ready to attend college in the fall, I bought her a new laptop computer as a Christmas gift. We unpacked the computer in her home in Olney, a working-class neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

That city and its mayor, John Street, happen to be at the center of an amazing popular revolt against the telecommunications companies. Last year, Street signed a new law that will provide low-cost wireless broadband service to every neighborhood in his city.

His actions provoked such fury among Verizon and the cable companies that their lobbyists immediately rushed to the state Capitol in Harrisburg and got a law passed forbidding any other municipality in the state from setting up a similar network.

Olney is one of three neighborhoods in Philadelphia to get the new service so far. As soon as I turned on her new computer, I was able to connect to the new Philly Wi-Fi portal for Olney.

Presto, Christina was on the Internet - FOR FREE!

No Cablevision, no Comcast, no AOL, no Verizon, all with their expensive monthly tolls for broadband service.

Here was the original promise of the Telecommunications Act actually being delivered, and in a low-income neighborhood to boot.

Yet the cable and phone companies are lobbying fiercely all over the country to prevent other publicly financed networks from being established.

If the rest of us don't wake up and start pressuring the politicians in Albany and Washington to fulfill the promises they made to us 10 years ago, the Internet will soon become like the New Jersey Turnpike in every living room in America.

Juan Gonzalez is a Daily News columnist. Email to: jgonzalez@edit.nydailynews.com

© 2006 New York Daily News

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