Bill Moyers On Net Neutrality

You may not have given any thought to all the warnings that the FCC is about to do away with "net neutrality." What does it have to do with you, anyway? and even if you knew, what could you do about it?

Moyers

The answers are "a whole lot," and "more than you might think." If regulations are put in place which privilege the delivery of content provided by the big internet service providers themselves (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T... actually, the list is distressingly short) over the content provided by web sites put up by your church, your nonprofits on which you depend to inform you about the environment, global warming, international relations, the niche market served by your one-person business, your favorite political activists, your least favorite political activists (!) whom you want to keep an eye on, etc., you will soon find the internet resembles old-fashioned broadcast TV networks in, say, the 1950s, where the companies responsible for delivering things to you are also the companies that determine what is delivered to you (at an acceptable transfer rate)... and hence what you consume. As so often happens with very large corporations who find themselves in control of sources (of laundry soap or information or entertainment), the telecom's (telecommunications companies... see the partial list above) will use their de facto monopoly power to supply you with what they think you should want, serving their own interests and profitability, and ignoring your real needs.

When Microsoft was at its most dominant in the software industry, they had a slogan, "Where do you want to go today?" which I used to misquote intentionally as "Where does Microsoft want you to go today?" The self-serving behavior of the telecom's under faulty FCC regulations will be similar. You won't like it at all... unless you're CEO of Comcast, or someone similar.

Tom Wheeler: FCC Chair,
former Telecom CEO, etc.

Here's the main thing about the threatened loss of net neutrality: Obama's FCC chair and several other FCC officials are former telecom executives. And they're ready to do this thing right away, starting this month. Don't dither while you decide: contact your congresscritters right away and tell them to put legislation in place to preserve net neutrality. Bug the bejezus out of the FCC chair and other high FCC officials. And be sure to remind Obama that he promised to protect net neutrality in his first campaign for the presidency.

Moyers offers three segments of basic information, video here (summary) and here (full show), and text here (article about net neutrality). It's now or never, folks... put it on your calendar for this week!

DC Circuit: Internet Still Not 'Common Carrier', So FCC Lacks Authority At Present To Mandate Net Neutrality

This could be really bad news... or not. Net Neutrality, a convenient handle for the set of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, issued in 2010 under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, under which the companies that actually provide the internet to Americans and America-based companies must treat all comers equally (i.e., roughly put, must provide the same services... bandwidth, connectivity and delivery... for the same prices, regardless of content), is in danger of being overthrown in favor of a model in which the largest corporate customers can receive the best services at good prices and the rest of us are left with the dregs... possibly dialup.

Other than the obvious, what is bad about this? There's a good argument to be made that a lot of the internet's contribution to the dramatic technological progress of the past two decades has happened at the fringes, where individuals or small companies have come up with often astonishing improvements in technology or process, in part because those individuals and small companies aren't out-competed for the "raw materials" ... i.e., bandwidth and delivery... by the telecoms themselves, AT&T, Verizon etc. After this ruling, if it survives the inevitable appeal to the Supreme Court, the big telecoms will be able to leave us little folk with inadequate resources, or adequate resources at obscene prices. (Internet access in America is already high-priced by world standards.)

This is not quite a done deal. The appeal to the Supremes is still a possibility, though I don't expect that to help much if at all. But there are still things the FCC could do, changes it could legally make to its own regulations and policies, that would enable it to regulate the internet as what it in fact is, namely, a common carrier. The previous FCC chair, Julius Genachowski, was apparently motivated to serve his large corporate telecom masters... apparently Obama's ideal as well. ("After all, the chief business of the American people is business" could as easily have been said by Obama as Coolidge.) The current FCC chair, Tom Wheeler, seems (according to several writers) to advocate a wait-and-see approach, which isn't much better, if it means ditching the open internet and waiting for the worst to happen. Or perhaps if we can mount an immense, dramatic public campaign, including citizens and small businesses, to pressure the FCC to preserve the open internet, just maybe it can be done. I'm not betting on it, but I'm not... yet... betting against it. Meanwhile, please read Kit O'Connell's linked post and view the attached video. (I don't often complain about fast speech, but these good people strain the limits of my old Texan ears.)