Say Goodbye to the Internet As We Know It

Few topics of government policy spur outrage, but don't mess with my Internet is one. The Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has upended yet another popular Obama administration policy by turning control of the Internet over to the corporations that provide access, allowing them to do with it as they please.

In just the week after the plan was announced by FCC
chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC received more than 200,000 phone calls in protest. Over 500,000 comments were left on the agency's website, adding to the 20 million that have come in since outlines of the agency's intentions became apparent earlier this year. (Obama's Clean Power Plan drew 4.3 million comments over six months).

A lunatic fringe shamelessly took its anger too far. The changes stirred threats of violence and ethnic slurs — Pai's parents immigrated from India — and daily protests in front of his house as far back as May, inexcusably frightening his wife and children ages 3 and 5.

Nevertheless, chairman Pai is resolute in defying public opposition despite there being no groundswell of support for the government ceding the Internet to corporations.

The FCC under Obama appointee Tom Wheeler established in 2015 the rule that required equal treatment by Internet service providers (ISPs) of all content, from e-mail to movies, delivering all to customers without preference given to any source, without slowing the one to speed the other. This simple rule was tagged "net neutrality". Mr. Pai calls it "micromanaging the Internet".

Under his plan, ISPs will be unrestrained, free to deliver the Internet to customers according to whatever preferential plans they devise. Internet providers need only be "transparent" about what they are doing. And the FCC would only monitor the companies to determine they are doing what they say they are. Proponents call this "restoring Internet freedom".

The legal right for the Obama administration to set the neutrality rule for ISPs was to declare broadband an essential public utility much like telephones and electricity. The White House, on the side of the communications companies, wanted the FCC to "roll back burdensome, monopoly-era regulations". In fact, the monopolies could become local. Many areas of the country have limited choices of Internet providers serving a given locale. The 2015 regulation at least imposed a standardized service, whereas the administration's changes gives those providers a monopolistic power to set their own rules in areas that have no recourse.

The Obama administration's tucking the Internet under the Communications Act of 1934 gave Mr. Pai an opening to regularly mock neutrality regulation as a Depression-era throwback — "Ma Bell" for a 21st Century industry. The Wall Street Journal said the Obama administration "regulates the web like an 1890s railroad". A vice-president at AT&T calls it "lumbering government intervention", unmindful perhaps that it was the government that was instrumental in the creation of the Internet.

The government and various universities such as MIT conceived of a "galactic network" of computers that could talk to one another which became a web that spans the world, an astounding creation that has thoroughly transformed how we obtain information and communicate with each other. Business was a beneficiary of this achievement; the government charged nothing for its use. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer in Switzerland, created the World Wide Web and earned no royalties, whereas it was an opportunity eagerly adopted by businesses for developing profitable services. Yet in the attitudes we quoted, we see that corporations now somehow think the Internet should belong to them.

There is some irony in their name-calling, considering that the FCC itself was created by the 1934 Act. The statute and what it structured served the country unchanged for 62 years. It is still in force.

Ajit Pai claims the abuse Obama's neutrality rule was meant to curb was only chimerical. Yet the changes he is putting in place, allowing ISPs to do as they choose with the only requirement that they must report their policies, and most likely obscured in the fine print of their contracts, is what opens the door to abuse. If a company owner holds a certain political view, nothing would prevent blocking content or political commercials, actions not even apparent to customers. Comcast says, “We do not and will not block, throttle, or discriminate against lawful content — and we will be transparent with our customers about these policies”, but that's voluntary and nothing blocks profit temptation or management turnover from seeing that change.

Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Charter and the others making up the dozen major providers argue that without the ability to introduce tiers of service at different rates, they have no incentive to innovate, to boost speeds, to build out their systems. “We need massive investment in networks going forward”, says Pai. “The infrastructure of the internet isn’t like slow-moving utilities. It’s not a water company."

Consumers in the millions have made it plain that they like the Internet the way it is. Yet in the face of protest Ajit Pai, knowing what's best for us, has said he is ending net neutrality "so that consumers can buy the service plan that's best for them". We will be seeing different plans at different rates emerge from the carriers. A basic plan that blocks favorites such as Facebook and Instagram will cost the least. A social media package will cost somewhat more. You say you stream movies? For that you need to buy the platinum plan. The Internet is destined to follow the cable television model as corporations seek ways to make more money.

Content companies such as Netflix will be told they need to pay extra to guarantee uninterrupted delivery of their streaming fare. Proof is that it's already happened. In early 2014, before the Obama administration stepped in, Comcast slowed Netflix downloads to a crawl. They extracted payment from Netflix and speed returned. Comcast has already indicated that it will resume that practice, charging content companies for fast downloading of their data once the Trump administration reverses the rules.

Mr. Pai showed an ideological mindset when he bypassed the 2014 Comcast incident, telling the Journal:

“The entire predicate of government regulation should be that there is, or is highly likely to be, a fundamental market failure that warrants pre-emptive regulation. That’s a sine qua non. But there was no evidence of that in 2015. The hypothetical harms that were discussed were exactly that: hypothetical.”

Major content creators and sources — Netflix, Google, Amazon, etc. — know this will be the outcome. They have been lobbying hard to halt the changes, foreseeing the ISPs becoming gatekeepers charging tolls to content providers and charging more to consumers at the other end. Conservatives consider this a standard free marketplace outcome — just how capitalism is supposed to work — and trust that it will self-correct through competition if any pricing structure gets out of hand.

Innovative start-ups and small companies don't see it that way. They will be disadvantaged, goes their argument, because they will be left in the slow lane for not having money enough to pay for the preferential treatment that the Internet giants can easily afford.

Five sit on the commission, three Republicans and two Democrats. The Republicans vote as one, so the changes are assured, no matter the public outrage. In a Journal profile last May (titled, "Why ‘Net Neutrality’ Drives the Left Crazy"), Mr. Pai was asked if the protests and public comments might deter him. His answer: "At the end of the day, I’m not going to be intimidated. No one is going to sway me away from the course that I truly believe is the right one for the American people".