An Internet for Everybody

[^o^CORVUS^o^]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opini ... wford.html

By SUSAN CRAWFORD
Published: April 10, 2010

Ann Arbor, Mich.

LAST week, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the legal authority to tell Comcast not to block certain uses of its Internet access services. This decision has become a rip-the-Band-Aid-off moment for the regulatory agency, forcing it to reconsider its effort to impose “network neutrality” by requiring that Internet access providers treat all content equally.

It also puts a substantial roadblock in the path of the commission’s National Broadband Plan, which proposes to spend billions of dollars to help provide Internet access, rather than phone access, for people in rural areas.

But the F.C.C. needn’t change either strategy. It can regain its authority to pursue both network neutrality and widespread access to broadband by formally relabeling Internet access services as “telecommunications services,” rather than “information services,” as they are called now. All the commission needs to do is prove it has a good reason.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the F.C.C. relabeled Internet access services — and certainly not the first time it addressed the need for equal access. Until August 2005, the commission required that companies providing high-speed access to the Internet over telephone lines not discriminate among Web sites. This allowed innumerable online businesses — eBay, Google, Amazon, your local knitter — to start up without asking permission from phone and cable companies. There was nothing unusual about this legal requirement; for more than 100 years, federal regulators had treated telegraph and telephone service providers as "common carriers," obligated to serve everyone equally.

But under the Bush administration the F.C.C. deregulated high-speed Internet providers, arguing that cable Internet access was different from the kind of high-speed Internet access provided by phone companies. Cable Internet access providers, the commission said, really offered an integrated bundle of services — not just Internet connection but also e-mail, Web hosting, news groups and other services. So the F.C.C. declared that high-speed Internet access would no longer be considered a “telecommunications service” but rather an “information service.” This removed all high-speed Internet access services — phone as well as cable — from regulation under the common-carrier section of the Communications Act.

This was a radical move, because it reversed the long-held assumption that a nondiscriminatory communications network was essential to economic growth, civic welfare and innovation. At the same time, the F.C.C. said that it would retain the power to regulate Internet access providers if the need arose, under another section of the Communications Act.

The Bush F.C.C. hoped that deregulation would prompt greater competition in Internet access services. But a wave of mergers instead reduced it. Prices stayed high and speeds slow. And eventually the carriers started saying that they wanted to be gatekeepers — creating fast lanes for some Web sites and applications and slow lanes for others.

In its decision last week, the appeals court said that the “information services” label given to high-speed Internet access providers means the F.C.C. cannot prohibit companies like Comcast from engaging in discriminatory activities. But if the F.C.C.’s labeling of high-speed Internet access providers undermines its ability to tell them what to do, how can it ensure that consumers get the information they need about real speeds and prices? How can it ensure that basic communications services — which, these days, means Internet access — are widely available?

The F.C.C. has the legal authority to change the label, as long as it can provide a good reason. And that reason is obvious: Americans buy an Internet access service based on its speed and price — and not on whether an e-mail address is included as part of a bundle. The commission should state its case, relabel high-speed Internet access as a “telecommunications service,” and take back the power to protect American consumers.

Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation policy, is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

[Rust]

The Internet is too established to start dividing up the pie now anyway. If Comcast tries any bullshit, the backlash will eat them alive.

We are the World Wide Web. We are a Nation unto ourselves.

[^o^CORVUS^o^]

I do hope so.

[Rust]

Let's put it this way: Do you really think the Porn Industry is going to sit by and let Comcast and the like start destroying their bottom line by making connections crappier to their "illicit" sites?

We're talking about the Industry that was the Kingmaker in the HD format war.

[artempress]

There is also the fear of letting the government regulate the internet. Perhaps their initial intention is to make a company be more free with its access, however that power is a double-edged sword, and the government might then use it to try to censor websites that speak out against it. If customers do not agree with a company's practices, they at least have some choice as to alternatives with service, even if that choice is fairly small currently. If customers do not agree with government's practices, it becomes much more difficult to find other alternatives without breaking the law or going through a lot of red tape.

Yes I do agree that it sucks that Comcast can regulate its customers' access, however I don't think government involvement is the answer to this problem. We all know what happens when you give government too much power over information. China is one major example.

[^o^CORVUS^o^]

In many areas of the nation, customers have no choice because companies have monopolies, and the only choice they have is one company and their pricing, or nothing. The major Telecommunications companies have absolutely no business controlling who can see what on the internet. They've already made news reporting and journalism in the united states a complete and utter farce. They have repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted with the exchange of information.

Government regulation isn't always a bad thing, and the slippery-slope of this act doesn't lead to the type of censorship we see in China. You distrust the government, so do I. But I trust corporate America even less, because in the end they -as a whole- care about nothing but their bottom line, and have little to no sense of social responsibility.

What sort of solution do YOU propose?

[^o^CORVUS^o^]

Another great point, from awa, directly countering some of the points made by the big cable companies and their allies:

If these companies are actually worried they can't provide internet service to people, instead of capping peoples' internet connections, they could always plug in some of the several million unused miles of fiber optic cable they convinced the US Government to pay for them to run in the late 90s to prevent exactly that problem.

This comes down to cable companies like Time Warner and Cox Communications--despite massive growth and record-breaking profits from their Internet Service divisions--being scared jiveless that internet services like Netflix Streaming and Hulu are going to eat their lunch in the content-provider arena. They want to make sure that, when the day comes that IPTV is a legitimate competitor to cable television, they'll be able to use their roles as internet gatekeepers to extort money out of Netflix or Hulu, or to force their own customers to use their IPTV service instead of being able to shop around. There's a word for those kinds of business practices: antitrust violations.

[^o^CORVUS^o^]

A video that ably breaks it all down...



There's a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, largely because people don't really read up on it. Net Neutrality enforcement isn't a slippery slope leading to chinese-style internet censorship, rather its an attempt to stop such a thing from happening. The ISPs are the ones who could censor and control your surfing-habits, not the enforcement of neutrality.