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  2. July 2017

July 2017

We All Agree on Net Neutrality, Except When We Don’t

The House Commerce Committee’s Communications and Technology Subcommittee held a hearing on July 25, 2017. It was advertised to be a Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing, meant to focus on agency actions and processes and to discuss draft legislation that would reauthorize the FCC, a step that has not been taken since 1990. But, as with most telecommunications policy discussions theses days, it quickly turned into a debate over network neutrality. Notably, this debate made public the below tactics by those in Congress and at the FCC who would repeal the rules barring broadband internet access service providers from web content blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. Throwing out those rules, especially paid prioritization (which prevents providers from making special deals with popular websites like Netflix to reach subscribers faster than their competitors), opens the door for broadband service packages that copy the cable TV model.

Is Amazon getting too big?

Earlier this year, the Yale Law Journal had published a 24,000-word “note” by Lina Khan titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” The article laid out with remarkable clarity and sophistication why American antitrust law has evolved to the point that it is no longer equipped to deal with tech giants such as Amazon, which has made itself as essential to commerce in the 21st century as the railroads, telephone systems and computer hardware makers had been in the 20th.

It’s not just Amazon, however, that animates concerns about competition and market power, and Khan is not the only one who is worrying. The same issues lie behind the European Union’s recent $2.7 billion fine against Google for favoring its own services in the search results it presents to its users. They are also at the heart of the long-running battle in the telecom industry over net neutrality, and the ability of cable companies and Internet service providers to give favorable treatment to their own content. They are implicated in complaints that Facebook has aided the rise of “fake news” while draining readers and revenue from legitimate news media. They even emerge in debates over the corrupting role of corporate money in politics, the decline in entrepreneurship, the slowdown in corporate investment and the rise of income inequality.

Politicians’ social media pages can be 1st Amendment forums, judge says

A federal judge in Virginia said that a local politician had violated the First Amendment rights of a constituent because the politician briefly banned the constituent from the politician's personal Facebook account. "The suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards," US District Judge James Cacheris wrote in a suit brought by a constituent against Phyllis Randall, the chairwoman of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors in Virginia.

The judge didn't issue any punishment against Randall, as the Facebook ban for constituent Brian Davison only lasted about 12 hours. That said, the judge noted Randall committed "a cardinal sin under the First Amendment" by barring the constituent who posted about county corruption. What's more, the judge pointed out from the first sentence of the ruling that "this case raises important questions about the constitutional limitations applicable to social media accounts maintained by elected officials."

Rep John Delaney (D-MD): Why I’m running for president

[Commentary] The American people are far greater than the sum of our political parties. It is time for us to rise above our broken politics and renew the spirit that enabled us to achieve the seemingly impossible. This is why I am running for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

Our government is hamstrung by excessive partisanship. We are letting critical opportunities to improve the country pass us by. And we are not even talking about the most important thing: the future. The victims of this leadership failure are the good people we are sworn to serve, and we are leaving our country ill-prepared for dramatic changes ahead. The current administration is making us less prosperous and less secure. I’m running because I have an original approach to governing and economic policy that can put us on a different course.

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Net Uniformity: Zero Rating and Nondiscrimination

[Commentary] The current network neutrality regulations set forth in the 2015 Open Internet Order (2015 OIO) prohibit Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or throttling lawful content or engaging in paid prioritization of Internet traffic. These three “bright line rules” cover a wide swath of ISP practices and are intended to promote competition and ensure quality service transmission for content providers and end users. At the same time, however, they fail to consider more nuanced issues that complicate achieving these outcomes.

Christopher Yoo, Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and founding director of the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, makes the case for one such issue in his recent work, “.” This post is the sixth in a series featuring the contents of a recent special issue of the Review of Industrial Organization, organized by the Technology Policy Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition. Yoo argues that, contrary to the FCC’s claim in the Order, practices like zero rating can stimulate competition among infrastructure providers and edge services. He contends that zero rating should not be prohibited but rather handled on a case-by-case basis. He supports these claims with economic theory, competition theory, and a number of case studies featuring zero rating.

[Romzek is a 2017 Google Policy Fellow and Research Associate at the Technology Policy Institute. Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at TPI]

Content Delivery Networks Complicate Debate Over Network Neutrality

The network neutrality debate is often framed as a fight by everyday citizens to prevent broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast from using their servers to throttle or slow the internet traffic of business rivals. But internet service providers’ opponents in the long-running Washington fight — major content “edge” providers like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix — don’t exactly have clean hands in the fight, according to analysts who say those firms have a way of favoring their content, in the form of content delivery networks.

CDNs are clusters of servers that cache data from content providers to reduce the delay before a transfer of data begins — a way for the prominent and deep-pocketed sites to load more quickly than others. The networks are often owned by third party companies like Akamai Technologies, while some of the largest content providers have built their own. Globally, 71 percent of all internet traffic will cross CDNs by 2021, compared with 52 percent in 2016. Those networks have the ability to discriminate against and interrupt content flows, according to Dan Rayburn, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan and executive vice president of Streamingmedia. Rayburn suggested that the Open Internet Order enacted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015 was myopically focussed on ISPs. “If you’re thinking rationally about this, you’d address it with CDNs, with transit providers, with backbone providers,” Rayburn said. “You’d address it with everybody.”

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