Net neutrality supporters vow a reboot after FCC pulls plug
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https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/net-neutrality-supporters-vow-reboot-after-fcc-pulls-plug-n829916
Net neutrality supporters vow a reboot after FCC pulls plug
Net neutrality supporters vow a reboot after FCC pulls plug
byAlex JohnsonandJo Ling Kent
A broad coalition of public officials,
activists and content producers vowed to hit Control-Alt-Delete on the
Federal Communications Commission's vote Thursday to end "net
neutrality" rules intended to make sure that all internet traffic is
treated equally. The FCC's party-line 3-2 vote
after a lengthy and fractious public comment period had long been
expected, and when it came Thursday, defenders of the Obama-era rules
were already swinging into action.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman
immediately said he would lead a multistate lawsuit to roll back the
vote. Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he would also
sue.
FCC scraps net neutrality rules regulating internet access1:37
"Allowing internet service providers to
discriminate based on content undermines a free and open internet,"
Ferguson said in a statement.
Schneiderman was already investigating as many
as 2 million fake public comments that he says were submitted to the
FCC during the public comment process. By going ahead with the vote, he
said in a statement, the agency had made "a mockery of government
integrity" and was rewarding "the very perpetrators who scammed the
system to advance their own agenda."
Net neutrality rules treat the internet like a
utility, ensuring that internet service providers, or ISPs, can't
charge different rates based on how much an entity is willing to pay.
Theoretically, elimination of the rules paves the way for ISPs to create
fast lanes and slow lanes and to block or throttle certain websites.
Paul Conti, an assistant professor of
communications at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, framed
the dispute this way:
On one hand, "people are worried that the
companies with lots of money would be able to stop companies with little
money from getting started," Conti told NBC affiliate WNYT.
On the other hand, he said, the internet is choked with spam and
illegal downloads, "and why shouldn't the Internet carriers be able to
stop that?"
What is 'net neutrality'?5:34
The major ISPs, including Comcast, the
nation's biggest service provider, have promised not to favor specific
customers. (Comcast is part of Comcast NBCUniversal, the owner of NBC
News.)
David L. Cohen, Comcast's senior executive
vice president, said Thursday that ISPs wanted the rules rescinded not
so they could prioritize traffic from preferred content providers but
because regulation of the internet had become politicized. He said the
industry had been "trapped in a cycle of regulatory ping pong" at the
"whim of the party in power."
"We should stop the litigation and legislative
threats by the party not in control of the FCC," Cohen said, calling
for bipartisan legislation to protect both the internet and consumers.
Chrissy Harbin, vice president of external
affairs for Americans For Prosperity, an activist group funded by the
conservative powerhouses Charles and David Koch, said the FCC's vote
would "rid the internet of government meddling [and] will foster an
online environment that spurs new advancement, competition and consumer
choice."
Few others involved in the debate were buying that.
Burt Lum, owner of Hawaii Open Data, a
nonprofit advocacy group in Honolulu, pointed out that big ISPs like
Comcast and Verizon are also among the biggest content providers online.
"They'll have a lot of content, so they'll enable their content to go on the faster pipe," Lum told NBC affiliate KHNL.
"I don't see how this is beneficial to the
general public," said Carla White, director of Gratitude Labs, an app
design company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
"All my classes are online. All my team is online. Everything I do is based on streaming data over the internet," White told NBC affiliate KDLT.
"As a small business owner, it's definitely a concern, because they can
throttle or discriminate against certain content. They say they won't,
but they absolutely have the tools to do it."
Net neutrality is dead. What does that mean?6:10
Jonathan Schwantes, senior policy counsel for
Consumers Union, the public policy and advocacy arm of Consumer Report,
called the vote "a big loss for consumers" that would "inevitably take
the battle over net neutrality back to the courtroom and Congress."
"Without these rules, your internet provider
can charge a toll for any website it chooses," Schwantes said. "The
biggest companies can most likely afford these new costs, but smaller
companies could be left out in the cold, and that fundamentally changes
the level playing field of the internet as we’ve known it."
Amanda Seales, who plays Tiffany DuBois on the
HBO series "Insecure," said the internet is supposed to allow people
"to have that space to speak."
"The problem is that when we start putting
dollar signs on that, we are now limiting people from having the
opportunity to not only give information, but also to receive
information," she said at a rally Thursday outside FCC headquarters in
Washington.
Meanwhile, the mayors of more than 50 U.S.
cities said in a letter opposing the FCC's decision that their cities
counted on the free access to the internet to drive economic growth and
to provide government services.
"Critical to our communities' reliance on the
internet is the confidence that our use of the Internet is not subject
to the whims, discretion, or economic incentives of gatekeeper service
providers to control or manipulate the experience of Internet users,"
they wrote.
Signers included the mayors of some of the
nation's biggest cities — including Bill de Blasio of New York, Eric
Garcetti of Los Angeles, Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Marty Walsh of
Boston — along with Sam Liccardo of San Jose, California, in Silicon
Valley, and Jenny Durkan of Seattle, home to Amazon.com.
Amazon and many of the biggest Silicon Valley
giants rallied support to preserve the net neutrality rules, arguing
that without them, ISPs could become the gatekeepers of information and
at consumers' expense.
Among those who spoke out against repeal were
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; Vint Cerf, a member of the U.N.
Broadband Commission for Digital Development who is widely described as
one of the "fathers of the internet"; Tim Berners-Lee, director of the
World Wide Web Consortium and the man credited with having invented the
web; Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive; and Whitfield
Diffie and Martin Hellman, both now at Stanford University, who created
the system of public key cryptography and security in 1975.
Calling themselves "pioneers of the internet," they and 16 other leading technology figures warned in a letter to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet
that repeal would allow ISPs to begin "blocking content, websites and
applications, slowing or speeding up services or classes of service, and
charging online services for access or fast lanes to Internet access
providers’ customers."
But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, the former Verizon
executive who led the drive to repeal the rules, told NBC News that
those fears were ungrounded.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai at an FCC meeting in Washington on Nov. 16. Zach Gibson / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
"Before 2015, we had a free and open internet
in which very small companies became global giants — Facebook, Amazon,
Netflix, Google," Pai said Thursday. "At the dawn of the commercial
internet, none of those companies had ever been conceived. Now they're
globally known powerhouses."Similarly, going forward, the greatest
threat to companies like that is that we don't have enough
infrastructure across the country," Pai said, arguing that a free market
was the better choice to regulate ISPs' conduct.
In cases of bad conduct, he said, the FCC remains the "cop on the beat."
"We require very robust transparency of
internet service providers," he said. "We also empower the Federal Trade
Commission to take action against any competitive conduct from any
company that might try to instigate that." Alex Johnson reported from Los Angeles. Jo Ling Kent reported from Washington.
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