The news services are filled with articles about Net Neutrality today. The
following is an editorial from National Review.
There is a common thread throughout these stories - the opponents of returning
to the light handed regulatory regime that allowed the Internet to grow
unfettered for two decades are engaged in massive FEAR MONGERING.
There are all kinds of dire predictions about changes that will happen as soon
as the next FCC report and order is published.
Prices will increase...
Content will be blocked...
ISPs will demand payments from streaming services for fast lanes...
The list goes on and on.
The reality?
Nothing is going to change.
Competition makes it nearly impossible for any ISP to behave badly.
The same cannot be said for “unregulated” Internet Services, as this editorial
points out. Many Internet Services have clearly exercised editorial control
over the content they allow. More than a year after the last Presidential
election, Congress is holding hearings to try to learn how foreign governments
and advocacy organizations were able to buy ads in an effort to influence the
election. We have learned how Google, Facebook and others have manipulated what
we see on the internet, and profited from advertising practices that are now
being drawn into question.
There are no major threats to Net Neutrality as defined by Tim Wu, but
governments around the world are starting to bring anti-trust charges against
the new Internet “monopolies.”
We now live in a world where anyone can communicate with anyone at any time. We
“may” understand that just because a web site says something, it is not
necessarily true; sadly this is now the reality for journalism in general.
Unfortunately many people are unable, or unwilling, to filter through all of
the crap.
If we are going to have an “anything goes” digital medium, where everyone can
access anything, the concept of “Net Neutrality,” as defined by Tim Wu,
completely misses the point. The problem is not access to the Internet, but
the literacy of those who access it.
The problem is not blocking access to any website, it is ability of the
operator of the website to behave in a non-neutral manner, and for consumers to
understand any potential bias. This reminds us of an age old cliche’
Be careful what you ask for...
Regards
Craig
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453984/net-neutrality-not-needed-not-fccs-job
Net Neutrality: Let Congress Decide if It’s Needed
November 22, 2017 4:00 AM
Under the leadership of Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission has, as
expected, announced that it will repeal Obama-era regulations mandating “net
neutrality,” a set of wide-ranging rules governing Internet services. The
change is a welcome one, and, as has been common with the regulatory reforms of
the Trump administration, there is a procedural piece and a policy piece, each
worth considering on its own merits.
Procedurally, the case against the FCC’s net-neutrality rule is that it exceeds
the agency’s statutory mandate. The FCC is not a free-range, independent
regulatory paladin with an open-ended portfolio; it is a creature of statute,
and its job is to enforce the law, mainly the Federal Communications Act, the
1934 law whose telephonic provisions were designed with the Bell telephony
monopoly in mind, not the iPhone. (The basics of its telephone-related
provisions were adopted from the 1910 Mann-Elkins Act, a Progressive-era
assault on — here’s a golden oldie — “destructive competition.”) There is no
title or provision in the Federal Communication Act that gives the agency a
clear mandate to impose pricing and content-management rules on Internet
providers, which is what net neutrality does.
Congress has considered the question of net neutrality, and Republicans even
proposed a compromise on the subject in 2015. But Congress declined to act on
the question. If Congress wants net neutrality, then Congress can pass a law
and let the FCC enforce it. It isn’t up to the FCC to create sweeping new
policy on its own. That kind of lawlessness ran rampant in the Obama
administration, and the Trump administration is undertaking important work in
undoing it, from the FCC to the EPA.
On to the substantive policy question. If Congress has seemed to be in no
particular hurry to impose net neutrality, that may be because there isn’t any
obvious need for it. The Internet thrived for decades with no net-neutrality
rule and very light overall regulation, and the problems contemplated by
net-neutrality advocates have not come to pass.
It isn’t that their concerns are entirely unreasonable. Consider the
fast-lane/slow-lane problem. Without net neutrality, Internet providers can
work out presumably profitable deals with bandwidth-hungry services such as
Netflix or online gaming companies, allowing them to pay to prioritize their
Internet traffic over less intensive users. The theory there is that a
half-second stutter makes watching a streamed movie unbearable but doesn’t
really have a meaningful effect on your email. All good and fine.
But it is, as net-neutrality advocates point out, possible that big-market
incumbents could exploit their ability to pay for priority access in way that
disadvantages smaller competitors; they could, in theory, even negotiate deals
that excluded competitors from premium access entirely, consigning them to
second-rate service. Lots of things could happen, but competition and the
Internet’s ethic of openness has, so far, prevented that kind of abuse. The FCC
is making a preemptive strike on a problem that does not exist and may never
exist. Getting the FCC into the business of regulating Internet companies at
this invasive a level in order to solve a hypothetical problem is a poor
tradeoff.
The FCC is making a preemptive strike on a problem that does not exist and may
never exist.
There are other dark whisperings. Absent net-neutrality rules, advocates say,
Internet providers could entirely exclude marginalized groups, such as
political and religious minorities, stifling their ability to use the Internet
to communicate, organize, and bring their concerns to the wider public. That is
of some concern to conservatives, who often have found their ideas and their
advocates unwelcome on social-media services such as Facebook and Twitter,
which have been far from even-handed in their editorial decisions, and might
expect as much from Internet providers. As odious as the ideas and attitudes
cultivated by neo-Nazi websites are, the decision by companies such as Network
Solutions and GoDaddy to exclude them from the Internet entirely presents
worrisome possibilities.
Again, the best and most immediate answer to that is robust competition and a
multiplicity of providers — something heavy-handed regulation is more likely to
hobble than to encourage. But if Congress wants to forge a compromise on the
low-hanging fruit and forbid the outright blacklisting or strangling of
would-be Internet communicators (as Republicans contemplated in 2015), then
that seems reasonable. But Congress has made no such decision.
A roving FCC that is all over the place and an Internet that is under more
stringent government control seems to us the precise opposite of how things
should stand. We’d much prefer to see a freewheeling Internet, ugly as that can
be at times, and an FCC that is narrowly constrained by the law. Pai, it should
be noted, does not oppose net neutrality per se, but believes that the FCC does
not have the authority to impose it on its own. Other, more enthusiastic
net-neutrality advocates have come to the same conclusion: that this is a
matter for Congress, which last revisited the question of Internet access in a
meaningful way two years after the first commercial web browser hit the market.
Governing 21st-century Internet commerce with the same policy assumptions
President Taft brought to turn-of-the-century railroad regulation is not
obviously the best way to proceed. For now, we are willing to let innovation
and competition shape the business side of the Internet, inasmuch as there is
no convincing and immediate rationale for more invasive federal intervention.
