Daily Digest 6/12/2018 (Net Neutrality)

With the network neutrality rules coming off the books, how is your Internet experience likely to change? Here's what you need to know:

The end of the bans on blocking, slowing and paid prioritization means your Internet providers will be free to engage in that activity without legal repercussions, so long as they disclose it to the public on their own websites or to the Federal Communications Commission. The repeal effectively narrows what the federal government would consider a net neutrality violation. Under the old policy, any blocking or slowing of websites would directly run afoul of the rules, inviting immediate enforcement. Under the new policy, a violation might occur when regulators find out that an Internet provider has been blocking websites without saying so. The new approach hands much of the responsibility for enforcing violations to the Federal Trade Commission, a sister agency. And in its repeal decision, the FCC explicitly rejects the idea that it has much authority to regulate Internet providers at all. The blocking and slowing of websites gets much of the attention in the net neutrality debate. But what's more likely to occur are subtle changes to your Internet experience that you may or may not notice. It's hard to say what specific changes you might experience; part of the whole point of undoing the net neutrality rules is that Internet providers will begin to experiment with business models we haven't seen before. One danger, according to consumer advocates, is that those new models could end up making it harder to discover innovative new services. Under this theory, you won't know what you're missing. But here are a few tactics that have been tried before that have drawn scrutiny under the old net neutrality rules: One is the offering of discounts on Internet service in exchange for letting your broadband provider mine your browsing history and other personal information. Another might be getting unlimited wireless access to a mobile app that your Internet provider owns, while usage of other apps continues to count against your monthly data cap.

[June 11], the Federal Communications Commission’s misguided repeal of network neutrality goes into effect. This is bad news for all of us who rely on an open internet for so many facets of civic and commercial life. Internet service providers now have the power to block websites, throttle services, and censor online content. They will have the right to discriminate and favor the internet traffic of those companies with whom they have pay-for-play arrangements and the right to consign all others to a slow and bumpy road. Plain and simple, thanks to the FCC’s roll back of net neutrality, internet providers have the legal green light, the technical ability, and business incentive to discriminate and manipulate what we see, read, and learn online. If the arc of history is long, we are going to bend this toward a more just outcome. The momentum around the country—from small towns to big cities, from state houses to courthouses, from governors’ executive actions to action in Congress—is proof the American people are not done fighting for an open internet. I’m proud to stand with them in that fight. We won’t stop today. It’s too important and our future depends on it.

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. On the topic of the Federal Trade Commission handling enforcement of open Internet rules, the following exchange took place:

Kai Ryssdal: "[The] Federal Trade Commission, while they’re lovely people and hard-serving civil servants and we appreciate all they do, they are overworked, they focus not solely on telecommunications and the injury has to happen first and then they can fix it after the fact".

Chairman Pai: "That's completely untrue. Chairman [Joseph] Simons the new chairman of the FTC, recently testified before the Senate, and he said they would aggressively use their Section 5 authority to take action against any unfair deceptive trade practice or any unfair method of competition."

Ryssdal: "But still you leave it to the consumer to bring the complaint."

Chairman Pai: "No, that's not true. The FTC can and has taken action, enforcement action against companies on its own."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is blaming congressional Republicans for the repeal of the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules. Minority Leader Schumer said that House Republicans could have prevented the regulations on internet service providers (ISPs) from being rolled back by taking up legislation that passed the Senate in May.  “By refusing to bring up the Senate-passed resolution to restore net neutrality, which passed the Senate by a powerful bipartisan vote, House Republican leaders gave a green light to the big ISPs to charge middle-class Americans, small business owners, schools, rural Americans, and communities of color more to use the internet,” Schumer said.

Internet service providers spent millions of dollars lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to end network neutrality, and they are certainly going to expect a healthy return on that investment. While the ISPs are clearly focused on increasing their profits, here the ISPs are likely to be patient. Their wisest course of action will be to eliminate net neutrality like a slow drip over time in the hope that consumers won’t notice and will stop caring. Net neutrality will be gone on June 11. When we will first feel the impact of that loss is unknown, but what is known is that the fight is far from over. To bring net neutrality protections back, call your member of Congress and insist they vote to join the Senate’s effort under the Congressional Review Act to save net neutrality. For extra effect, when you talk to your member of Congress, be certain to mention that net neutrality will be on your mind when you go to the polls in November. Although we may have lost net neutrality in the short run, if the 82 percent of Republicans, 90 percent of Democrats, and 85 percent of independents who favor net neutrality make their voices heard, there is no doubt we will win in the end.

No matter what happens June 11, network neutrality repeal opens the door to some real abuses of internet service providers’ power — not hypothetical scenarios, but real predatory practices we’ve already seen in the past. These incidents show how complicated the issue of net neutrality is: all of these transgressions happened after the 2005 Internet Policy Statement, which laid out four “open internet” principles that would guide the agency’s decisions.

• Comcast blocks peer-to-peer networks: In 2007, America’s second-largest internet service provider was caught injecting its own commands into users’ internet traffic, stalling peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent and Gnutella.
• AT&T block skype: when Skype came to iOS in April 2009, AT&T (which held an exclusive contract for the iPhone) convinced Apple to block calls made over its wireless network.
• Verizon protects ISIS and blocks Google Wallet: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon announced a mobile payment system called Isis in 2010, but before it had a chance to launch, Google announced its own Google Wallet payment app for Android. Google tried to add Wallet to Samsung Galaxy Nexus phones on Verizon, but Verizon reportedly nixed the plan; publicly, it claimed the system wasn’t compatible with the Galaxy Nexus NFC chip.
• MetroPCS blocks everything but YouTube: Just a month after the Open Internet Order passed, MetroPCS launched a discount phone plan that seemed to violate its spirit. The $40 plan offered unlimited talking, texting, and web browsing. But if you wanted to stream audio or video, your only option was YouTube, unless you paid extra for “additional data access.”

The two events in Washington (net neutrality June 11 and AT&T/Time Warner ruling June 12) could lead to further consolidation of wireless, cable and content giants, public-interest advocates say. And they fear that behemoths like AT&T might someday prioritize their own TV shows and other content over rivals’. Internet service providers (ISPs) deny that they would engage in such a practice — yet consumer watchdogs worry that people would have little legal recourse if they did. “I think this could be a one-two punch to consumers and online competition,” said Gene Kimmelman, the president of Public Knowledge. “The combination of no net neutrality and video consolidation creates new bottlenecks that empower the traditional media industry to raise prices and limit online competition.”

The economic upside of internet access is being pushed by rural broadband advocates across the country who say that there isn’t enough being done to connect rural communities. Building out the necessary infrastructure, they argue, could function as an economic and informational driver for some of the country’s most cash-strapped regions. But one of the largest challenges, advocates say, is that there isn’t enough data to know where to invest effectively. The American Reinvestment Act provided funding for all 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia to extend broadband availability to rural areas, allowing policymakers and others to make informed decisions when allocating resources. But the funding for that project expired in 2015 and each year the data it produced becomes increasingly inaccurate and irrelevant. To make matters even more difficult for rural communities, major telecom companies don’t see many dollar signs in their own future by providing rural areas with access to the expensive infrastructure.

The AT&T/Time Warner case could be decided any number of ways. Judge Richard Leon could rule in the government's favor, forcing AT&T to abandon the deal or to sell off key assets such as Turner or DirecTV to move forward. Judge Leon could side with AT&T, saying there is no threat to competition and allowing the deal to proceed unimpeded. In that scenario, AT&T would not be required to divest anything or make any other concessions and could close the deal by June 18. One wild card is an offer that AT&T has made to assuage its critics. In 2017, the company sent 1,000 letters to rival TV providers saying it was willing to commit to an arbitration process after the merger with any TV service that feels it is being overcharged for Time Warner content. Judge Leon appeared to show strong interest in the arbitration offer, asking witnesses about it on multiple occasions despite efforts by the government to exclude it from consideration in the trial. As a result, some analysts believe Leon could seek a middle-ground approach that mixes in the arbitration offer somehow or, perhaps, a remedy Judge Leon designs himself. He could even ask the two sides to work with him to develop a solution.

In the cities and municipalities of America, people's fears and misunderstandings about the onset of 5G wireless come to a head. Now, lawmakers and public officials are being prompted to make sudden moves that could change everything.

[Commentary] Requiring the targeting data label on ads is just a simple way of bringing the shadowy business of data collection and ad targeting into the light of day. If Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are sure that there is nothing wrong with harvesting users’ personal data to place ads, they should have no problem with being completely open with consumers about the real costs of the “free” service their company provides. Internet advertisers may complain that ad targeting is a complicated business and that the targeting of one ad may rely on many pieces of user data. Well, so be it. The drug companies probably weren’t wild about being required to publish all those possible drug side effects in the small print of their direct-to-consumer ads, but they did it, because the public had the right to know.