As Charles Sumner said at the time:

“This glorious invention was vouchsafed to mankind that we might salute and converse with one another respectively stationed at remote and isolated points for a nominal sum.”

But instead, he continued, “A wicked monopoly has seized hold of this beneficent capacity and design, and made it tributary, by exorbitant tariffs, to a most miserly and despicable greed.”

So quotes Matthew Lasar in a brief, eye-opening account of US battles over control of the telegraph or — with a steampunk wink and nod — the “Victorian Internet.”

When juxtaposed against current Network Neutrality debates it should give pause to the argument that we hand over the keys to future Internet growth and development to the Verizons, Time Warners, and Comcasts operating today.

Take a trip down Lasar’s memory lane and you see how Western Union’s monopoly controlled the telegraph by throttling competition, and curried political favor by disrupting opposition party information and communication.

In turn, the Associated Press struck a deal with Western Union and agreed, as Lasar writes, that they would never “encourage or support any opposition or competing Telegraph Company.” With that that relationship in their pocket, the AP went on it own merry way and crushed competing news and information organizations that were beginning to crop up around the country.

You could argue that the telegraph and the Internet are apples and robots, but the similarities between media consolidation and desired control over information access between now and then are clear.

Lasar’s evocative article is available via Ars Technica.

Whether it’s tired campaigns about their content being “stolen,” or tired discussions about their content being “taken,” its a tired organization huffing and puffing on its last legs.

And this is too bad.

I mean no offense. AP content can be quite good. The idea behind the enterprise itself is noble. Unfortunately, the AP’s business hearkens back to some Luddite age that perhaps once was but will never be again. And the fatal AP flaw is that it constantly comes up with new plans and ideas that might have worked in that bygone age but have little relevance in the business of today.

The organization is not going to go quietly. While it generates cash less quickly than it hemorrhages it, the AP has notoriously spent millions trying to create some sort of new fangled digital rights management system that most technical observers concluded wouldn’t work.

Really, though, that’s the AP’s prerogative. If it decides it wants to create a non-generative, restrictive DRM news system, go ahead. It just runs so far against anything and everything that’s been successful in the content space that I’m surprised it’s suggested in the first place.

While few have answers, interesting solutions are those that are open and generative, meaning that others can build on top of them. Consider this. What’s going on here is in an example of building, linking and sharing that viewers accept, understand and participate in. AP blowback is simply one where it cannot understand why or how people aren’t paying the same dollar amount for that they once did.

And its repetitive moaning, groaning and threatening is getting tired.