Four ripple effects of the FCC’s net neutrality rules

[Commentary] The Open Internet Order (OIO) has only been in effect for a year, so it is too soon to fully evaluate its effects, but it is not too soon to begin collecting data and analyzing results. The DC Circuit’s charitable (to the Federal Communications Commission and the Administration) opinion means the OIO is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, so we will want to know what effects the order is actually producing. The OIO is clearly making an impact in the following four areas:

Disclosure: One of the first consequences of the order was the introduction of a performance label devised by the FCC’s Consumer Advisory Committee. This label is meant to be an FCC-sanctioned safe harbor for Internet service providers to satisfy the OIO’s disclosure requirement, but it provides little in the way of useful information.

Privacy: At the time that the Title II privacy law was actually written, the only networks that existed in its scope were telephone networks. Since those networks have a totally different structure than the Internet, the legacy privacy law effectively governed a closed system.

Business Broadband: The monopoly telephone network operator was required to offer data services to businesses at essentially any location for a set price. At one time, data services were simply a part of the monopoly, so this requirement arguably made sense. The FCC wants to impose this requirement on ISPs, but not on competitive firms that offer the same service in limited territories.

New television: While the FCC’s proposed set-top box rules are not a direct consequence of the OIO, they’re emboldened by the spirit that animated the OIO: the desire to provide benefits to over-the-top “edge” services at the expense of the firms who invest in networks. There is a direct philosophical connection between the OIO and the data volume price controls the FCC required in the Charter/Time Warner Cable merger and which may be coming to your network provider in the near future.

[Bennett is a researcher, and coinventor of Wi-Fi and the modern Ethernet architecture.]