New Yorker

The Federal Communications Commission’s self-imposed hiatus means that a number of high-profile regulations are unlikely to be acted upon until President-elect Trump takes office, if ever. One of those issues is video description – when a narrator explains, for the benefit of the blind or visually impaired, what’s happening onscreen during a TV show or movie, squeezing his or her voice-over into the gaps between dialogue.

The problem is that not many shows have video description. Currently, FCC regulations require the four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) to provide just four hours of the service per week, for primetime or children’s programming. Five cable channels (USA, TNT, TBS, History, and Disney) are subject to the same requirement. A deleted agenda item from a November FCC meeting would have expanded the FCC’s requirement by more than half, up to nearly seven hours per week, and applied it to the top ten non-broadcast channels, including premium ones such as HBO and AMC. Today, the fear in the blind community is that a temporary delay might become a permanent halt.

[Commentary] Network neutrality has undoubtedly captured national attention. You’d be excused for wondering what all the fuss is about. Most people have a rough sense that net neutrality is about the rules for Internet traffic; but the precise debates about regulatory authority and the rules themselves are abstruse. Net neutrality has seized the moment because it is standing in for a national conversation about deeper values.

It is, among other things, a debate about opportunity -- or more precisely, the Internet as another name for it. As such, the mythology of the Internet is not dissimilar to that of America, or any open country -- as a place where anyone with passion or foolish optimism might speak his or her piece or open a business and see what happens. No success is guaranteed, but anyone gets to take a shot. That’s what free speech and a free market look like in practice rather than in theory.

The ideal of equality in the public sphere is another underlying theme in the current debate. While there’s always been some inequality, it is especially acute today. The prospect that the FCC might allow a “fast lane” for some traffic, leaving everyone else in a slower lane, has ignited the argument that private inequality must have its limits, and that some public spaces must remain open to all.

Apart from these abstract ideas, net neutrality is also standing in for a debate regarding the future of television, which is the most popular medium of our time. The clash between Comcast and Netflix over allegations of false congestion and the payment of extra fees is woven into the larger discussion. Comcast, of course, mainly represents what television is now, while Netflix represents what it is becoming.