Art Brodsky is communications director for Public Knowledge, a public interest group working at the intersection of information and technology policy.
The legislative opposition to establishing net neutrality is the story of a mantra gone horribly wrong. An idea crafted 10 years ago to protect the Internet, then a new medium, is being morphed into a weapon that would destroy the not-so-new medium a few years from now.
This “new Internet” would be one controlled not by individual freedom, but by the whim of the telephone and cable networks' owners.
It is ludicrous for the telephone companies and their congressional allies, principally Republicans, to fight against net neutrality on the basis of the fraudulent “don’t regulate the Internet” mantra. The industry has the gall to name one of their propaganda sites, www.dontregulate.org, part of the “Hands Off the Internet” family—brought to you by the telephone and cable industries . All of their other arguments hang from this one basic, misapplied concept.
The industry and their congressional allies argue that any number of horrible outcomes would flow from “net neutrality regulation.” You can pick your own fallacies from among the talking points: don’t regulate the Internet because it would create volumes of new regulations governing content, don’t regulate because it would be the first major government regulation of the Internet. Or, don’t regulate the Internet because big Internet companies, want access for free, and so consumers will get stuck with the bill in the form of higher prices.
None of them are true. Transmission over the Internet has been regulated for years, until 2005 to be exact, when the FCC took away the rules. The Internet grew up in the dial-up days under “common carrier” regulation, when telephone companies had no control over content on their networks. No one wants to regulate the Internet—the regulation is of the services of the telephone and cable companies.
Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act three years ago to attempt to regulate spam. You can argue that no one likes spam, but it’s hard to argue that this is not regulating the Internet, because email is an integral part of the system. Many of those legislators who now oppose Net Neutrality on the basis of “don’t regulate” voted to curb spam.
Additionally, consumers already pay for Internet access, as do Internet-based companies large and small. Their bills run into millions and millions of dollars. No one is asking for Internet access for free.
At the root of all of this nonsense is an original philosophy gone wrong. And what was the original mantra? “The Internet is different.”
The fledgling Center for Democracy and Technology had fought the restrictive Communications Decency Act of 1996 all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their argument was that the Internet was different. The CDT website says:
The CDA imposed broadcast-style content regulations on the open, decentralized Internet and severely restricted the first amendment rights of all Americans. CDT strongly opposed this legislation because it threatened the very existence of the Internet as a means for free expression, education, and political discourse. Although well-intentioned, the CDA was ineffective and failed to recognize the unique nature of this global, decentralized medium.
On June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court threw out the CDA, and as it did so, enshrined the notion of a protective barrier around the Internet. The Supreme Court decision quoted a lower court ruling describing the Internet as “a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication.”
All of those arguments from the telephone and cable industries and their allies about not regulating the Internet forget the original purpose of the defense and the character of the Internet.
What we’re left with is a hollow argument. Republicans stick with the “don’t regulate” reflex reaction, even though the result of minimal net neutrality rules would be to continue the freedom and openness that we have enjoyed, and the result of “don’t regulate” would be industry gatekeeper control of the Internet. The industry twists the “don’t regulate” meme into an excuse to create its own privileged tier of services.
The Internet that CDT, the American Civil Liberties Union and dozens of organizations defended is something far different from what the telephone companies would create. What’s been lost, and where the industry arguments went astray, is that the “don’t regulate/hands-off” philosophy was first invented as a way of protecting openness and diversity—exactly what the telephone and cable companies now want to whittle away.
The Internet that the telephone and cable companies want to create, built around their “don’t regulate” campaign is just the opposite. It would be, as AT&T, Verizon, Qwest and BellSouth forthrightly put it, a “private network,” a tier of service on which they would put their special services, charging extra for the privilege. It’s outrageous for “don’t regulate” to be the telephone companies’ excuse for a closed system that many commentators have likened to cable TV—where the network operators choose who gets on and who doesn’t.
The Internet that was originally protected was the one we have today—open, uncontrolled, accessible by anyone.
