Internet/Broadband

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rollback of its 2015 Open Internet Order has put the term “net neutrality” back in the political zeitgeist. The phrase itself is more strategic marketing than precise meaning, but understanding that all it really means is heavy-handed government regulation of the internet makes it clear that net neutrality policy is bad for broadband consumers.

The net neutrality debate has little to do with making the internet open for users to go where they wish online. Americans have always enjoyed that liberty, even before the Open Internet Order was passed. Internet service providers have every incentive to provide that freedom to their customers.

[Jessica Melugin is an adjunct fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington]

In an effort to better understand the challenges facing rural broadband internet service providers, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has been traveling west from Milwaukee (WI) toward Wyoming for the past week, making stops in rural towns across America. On June 9, he made a stop at Black Hills State University for a roundtable discussion with area telecommunications stakeholders. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) was also in attendance.

Asked, "Can you speak a little bit about the FCC’s efforts to increase broadband service to rural areas as it relates to closing the digital divide between rural and urban areas?" Chairman Pai said, "This to me is the No. 1 issue that we need to be focused on." Asked, "There’s been a pretty consistent characterization of you as an enemy of net neutrality. What’s your reaction to this label? Is it wrong?" Chairman Pai said, "I would hope that people of goodwill would focus on the facts, and the facts are that everyone supports a free and open internet....No one is talking about leaving consumers to the mercy of any competitive monopolist. All we’re talking about is how to best preserve that core value of the open internet and preserve the incentive to invest in the networks going forward."

We can all agree that what we could do with less is the pull and push between federal, state, and local policymakers. We are in need of and should strive for a new era of cooperative regulation, that recognizes the states as laboratories of democracy, and your federal partners as a uniform guide where and when appropriate. So allow me to take some time this morning, to outline areas where we can work together, and other areas I feel, where states and localities should take the lead when it comes to privacy, universal service, pole attachments, rights-of-way access, and inmate calling.

Some states, including Colorado, are not relying solely on federal programs to help bring broadband to unserved rural areas. Telecompetitor recently interviewed Tony Neal-Graves, associate director of the Colorado Broadband Office, about Colorado broadband policy and about the $2.1 million in grant funding that will be made available to network operators for broadband policy.

The Colorado Broadband Office will administer the fund. As Neal-Graves explained, the fund that the Colorado Broadband Office will award is the second of two Colorado-based broadband programs. The first program, administered through the Department of Local Affairs, was funded through royalties paid to the state for metal extraction. The program provided close to $20 million on a one-time basis to create a strategic plan for each region in the state and for middle mile deployments.

Mobile devices have rapidly become one of the most common ways for Americans to get news, and the sharpest growth in the past year has been among Americans ages 50 and older, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. More than eight-in-ten US adults now get news on a mobile device (85%), compared with 72% just a year ago and slightly more than half in 2013 (54%). And the recent surge has come from older people: Roughly two-thirds of Americans ages 65 and older now get news on a mobile device (67%), a 24-percentage-point increase over the past year and about three times the share of four years ago, when less than a quarter of those 65 and older got news on mobile (22%).

The strong growth carries through to those in the next-highest age bracket. Among 50- to 64-year-olds, 79% now get news on mobile, nearly double the share in 2013. The growth rate was much less steep – or nonexistent – for those younger than 50.

[Commentary] Over the last month, the Federal Communications Commission received 2.6 million public comments critical of Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to roll back President Obama’s "network neutrality" rules. This outpouring of public sentiment must be evidence of participatory democracy at it best, right? Not quite. A sizable percentage of these comments appear to be fake. What the net neutrality comment debacle underscores is that the Internet age may mean the collapse of the public comment process, at least for significant public policy issues.

Sophisticated bots and automated comment platforms can create thousands and thousands of comments from senders who may or may not be real. Most rulemaking pertains to subject matter that is less widely-watched than net neutrality, and usually concerns only a small sliver of the public. The public comment process has some virtues and should continue. It is time to recognize, however, that for rulemaking over issues on the scale of net neutrality, with entrenched and vocal participants on both sides of the aisle, the public comment process has become a farce.

[Peter Flaherty is president of the National Legal and Policy Center.]

[Commentary] The innovation economy needs competition, unfettered access for consumers and innovative flexibility. Working together, Congress should surprise the country, remove the politics from setting broadband internet standards and get something done most Americans can agree on.

[Jamal Simmons is a political analyst and a co-chairman of the DC-based Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA).]

[Commentary] Network neutrality, adopted by the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama presidency, was the first step in transitioning the internet into a government-run monopoly. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is intent on returning the internet back to its roots, cutting out unnecessary regulations - most of which have been foisted on the American people over the past two years. Recently, the FCC voted to overturn the net neutrality rules. While the commission was voting, a group of liberal activists were protesting inside with signs demanding the government shut down popular alternative websites like Breitbart and the Drudge Report.

[Greg Young is the nationally syndicated host of the radio show Chosen Generation]

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s reliance on "real" economists in Econ Cloud Cuckoo Land (ECCL) to reverse Title II reclassification is going to get slammed in the courts big time. I would hope that real world common sense would prevail, and Pai would back away from his ill-considered proposal. But real world common sense is scoffed at in Econ Cloud Cuckoo Land.

As long as Pai continues to prefer Econ Cloud Cuckoo Land over the actual real world, we can expect him to continue to pursue policies that don’t work in the real world and don’t pass muster in court.

[Harold Feld is the senior vice president at Public Knowledge]

[Commentary] Prime Minister Theresa May’s political fortunes may be waning in Britain, but her push to make internet companies police their users’ speech is alive and well. In the aftermath of the recent London attacks, PM May called platforms like Google and Facebook breeding grounds for terrorism. She has demanded that they build tools to identify and remove extremist content. Leaders of the Group of 7 countries recently suggested the same thing. Germany wants to fine platforms up to 50 million euros if they don’t quickly take down illegal content. And a European Union draft law would make YouTube and other video hosts responsible for ensuring that users never share violent speech. The fears and frustrations behind these proposals are understandable. But making private companies curtail user expression in important public forums — which is what platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become — is dangerous. Outraged demands for “platform responsibility” are a muscular-sounding response to terrorism that shifts public attention from the governments’ duties. But we don’t want an internet where private platforms police every word at the behest of the state. Such power over public discourse would be Orwellian in the hands of any government, be it May’s, Donald Trump’s or Vladimir Putin’s.

[Keller is the director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, and previously was associate general counsel to Google]