A Free and Open Internet

An open internet—where the end user chooses what content they want, when they want it, and how they want it—has been a goal almost as long as there has been an internet. There are countries in the world that make every attempt to control who has internet access and what they can see. The internet provides free flow of information and ideas, as well as providing the platform for online commerce, publishing, marketplaces, media and a host of other services. Just like controlling the media/press in authoritarian regimes in the past, controlling the internet is essential for keeping order and control over a population. Conversely, the open internet, one that doesn’t discriminate based on content type or origin, is a tool for enabling the free flow of information, a platform for open communication and a method for innovating in business. While the name “net neutrality” can be a little confusing to many people, to be clear, this issue is a freedom of speech issue, not just one of neutrality.

The open internet in the U.S. is now under attack. A couple of years ago, the FCC reclassified the internet as a utility, which gave the FCC the ability to regulate the internet service providers (ISP’s) under Title II as common carriers. This ensured that the ISPs were required to treat all legal content that was sent through their internet service as equal. It’s like any utility: You pay for a service and the company you pay provides it. They can’t intentionally make some services better than others based on being paid extra to treat that service in some preferential way. They are paid to “deliver” the service to you, and must treat all services (as long as the service is legal) the same. The need for this reclassification was straight forward; ISPs had started charging for “fast lanes” on the internet and giving preferential treatment to certain content providers. The rules prevented that.

The business model for ISPs is complicated by some other factors that add to the need to create ways to keep them open and unbiased. Most ISPs are also cable providers (which include phone, internet and cable TV) and/or mobile broadband providers. Over the past decade, cable and broadband providers have added media/content businesses of their own. In other words, you can rent and stream movies from a service like Netflix, or you could do the same “on demand” from your cable provider. If ISPs have the right to create fast (and by inference, slow) lanes for certain content, they have an unfair advantage over other content providers. They also have way more control over the content I use than should be permissible. The act of speeding up or slowing down content delivery has the effect of promoting some content over others.

An example will make this clearer. Let’s say you are a Verizon ISP customer. You likely also have Verizon cable TV and maybe phone service as well. The services are often bundled to make it more attractive to single source them. So you pay Verizon for internet service, as in the ability to get access to all websites, media and streaming media...content at an agreed speed. In addition you pay media sites for access to premium content: Hulu, Netflix, NY Times, etc. Then Verizon, the company you pay for internet service, delivering and uploading content at agreed speeds based on what you’re willing to pay, turns around and charges the other service you already pay a fee to get the content to you in a fast lane versus a slow lane. The content the ISP sells gets a fast lane of its own, of course. So in effect if you’re a content provider you must pay to compete against content this is treated preferentially, but doesn’t have to pay. As a consumer you already paid for both access to the content and the delivery of that content to you across the internet at an agreed speed (and that speed determines how much you pay). Verizon would like for you to pay it for Verizon content too, but if you don’t it is making up for that revenue by charging a third party for something—content delivery—for which it has already received a fair price and agreed to deliver to you at certain speeds.

One more data point to consider: If you decide you don’t like the ISP’s service, speed, business practices, etc., you can switch, right? So how many ISPs do most people in the U.S. have as a choice? Excluding your mobile broadband provider, which I suppose you could choose to use at home, most people in the U.S. have access to, at best, two providers, and many only have the one choice. In this situation, where there are limited or no competitors to a service that many people would consider critical, the market doesn’t function correctly; it is not self-regulating as the new FCC seems to believe.

Allowing ISPs to discriminate over what content is delivered at fast versus slow speeds is unfair and favors the ISP’s content in an unfair way. It does one more thing though—it stifles innovation and supports the large content providers. It favors the companies that can afford to pay more for fast lanes, the big players like Apple, Google and Facebook, and makes it much harder for new, innovative startups to compete.

The current FCC under chairman Ajit Pai, opened up the docket called “Restoring Internet Freedom” last week. The plan is pretty clear: It undoes what former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler did to protect the open internet by reclassifying broadband. To pile on, nine senators also introduced a bill called “The Restoring Internet Freedom Bill” that would essentially prevent the FCC from regulating ISPs in the future if it passed. While the titles of both the docket and the bill have “Internet freedom” in them, they do anything but protect the freedom of an open internet; although I suppose you could argue that they do make the internet free of regulation. Having already seen what happens to the internet when ISPs are not regulated, resulting in paid fast and slow lanes, favoring particular content over other and exempting some data from data caps, I’ll take mine with regulation, please.  

Why the sudden need to reverse the net neutrality rules put in place under Wheeler? Since Pai took over as chairman, he has started undoing many of the rules put in place from protecting privacy to keeping the internet open and equal; and to be fair, rules that he opposed before he was chairman. As for the nine senators, they seem to have various reasons. The telecom services lobby is likely a part of that motivation. According to OpenSecrets.org, there are 455 telecom services lobbyists who have already spent nearly $21 million in 2017, on top of $85M million in 2016 and $91 million in 2015.

What can you do? The first thing is to leave comments on the FCC website for docket #17-108 “Restoring Internet Freedom.” You can also call and/or write your own senator, as well as the nine sponsors of the current iteration of the bill.