It looks as though the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) is going to do what it has been expected to do ever since Ajit Pai became
its chairman: it is going to end net neutrality. [1]
For those who need a refresher, internet service providers
(ISPs) are currently not permitted to discriminate against content on the
internet. They may not, for example, allow their customers to access only the
websites of certain companies; or, more realistically, they may not bring
content from their favorite companies (the ones that pay a certain fee, for
example) to their customers in a more efficient manner than they do for their
favorite companies’ competitors.
The way it would look if they were permitted to engage in
such conduct is that the sites of the favored companies would load right away,
while the sites of other companies would take a minute or so to appear fully on
customer screens. The frustration to the consumer caused by trying to access
the sites of the disfavored companies would be a competitive advantage for the companies
with favored sites, a competitive advantage likely obtained only through the
payment of a fee, rather than, say, product quality.
Mr. Pai, it seems, is fine with such goings on, or, at
least, he thinks they are none of the FCC’s business. FCC officials are taking
the position that “the blocking and slowing of some content could be seen as
anticompetitive,” and that such practices will henceforth be “be policed by the
Federal Trade Commission or the Justice Department.”
One is left to wonder why Mr. Pai is so anxious to rid the
world of net neutrality rules, if other existing law will effectively keep them
in place. What is the advantage of abolishing net neutrality rules if net
neutrality will remain the law of the land?
A similarly puzzling statement has issued forth from
Comcast, one of the nation’s largest ISPs. It says that it will “not slow
websites that contain legally permitted material.” In other words, they’re
going to impose net neutrality on themselves. But if that is the case, why has
the company been lobbying so hard to get rid of net neutrality rules? Why fight
against a law that you don’t want to break?
One suspects that, barring a miraculous congressional
interference in the public interest, we are about to have an internet that, in
some locations at least, works with amazing speed when accessing sites owned by
dues-paying companies, and notably slower, if at all, when trying to reach the
sites of small start-ups. Some companies might even purchase for themselves
exclusive rights with certain ISPs.
We’ll learn to accept it with the same cynicism that we
bring to all of the diminishing returns that characterize our increasingly
plutocratic government. But maybe there is something even more pernicious
afoot.
What the free internet has accomplished like nothing else
ever has is the democratization of information. It used to be the case that
news and information was the jurisdiction of limited corporate sources.
Nowadays all sorts of views can be represented. True, this has caused pseudo
news to proliferate, but the remedy for that is increased discernment rather
than institutional censorship. Shutting down the free internet, abolishing net
neutrality, threatens to effectively silence independent opinion and information
sources.
Admittedly, your humble servant has a personal stake in that
outcome, but he is hardly the only one concerned. And there is no guarantee
that the effective censorship will be limited to fringe writers, publications,
and blogs. Should any ISP be taken over by an ideological interest, the result
could be an entire region restricted to a single political voice on the
internet. There will be a retort that such an eventuality is not likely, but
does that excuse a regulatory scheme that makes it possible?
Nowadays we hear a lot about regulations, about how we need
to rid ourselves of them, as if regulations were bad things in themselves. But
they are not. Some regulations are good and necessary. Rules maintaining an
open internet are such regulations, and we should keep them.
