Network management

AT&T and Comcast have solidified a court victory over the metro government in Nashville (TN), nullifying a rule that was meant to help Google Fiber compete against the incumbent broadband providers. The case involved Nashville's "One Touch Make Ready" ordinance that was supposed to give Google Fiber and other new Internet service providers faster access to utility poles.

Despite tying a projected five-year capital expenditure figure of $50 billion to the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision to roll back its net neutrality mandates, an analysis of Comcast’s capital expenditures (capex) reveals that the top US cable operator was on track to spend about that much even before the agency voted to deregulate. 

Here’s how the concept of a free and open internet will continue to exist despite the repelation of these net neutrality regulations. If you’re a fan of internet freedom who would rather not pay several hundreds of dollars every year to be able to access the specific websites you like, the first and probably easiest way for you to fight back would be to use a virtual private network (VPN). But there’s a catch.

In a typical week, NYC Mesh–a community-owned internet network in New York City–might get five requests from people who want to join. In the wake of the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to roll back net neutrality rules, it started getting dozens of requests a day. Without net neutrality protections, big telecom companies can choose to slow down or block certain sites. If you want to watch Netflix, for example, Comcast could decide to charge you more to access it.

"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” It was 1968, and J.C.R. Licklider, a director at ARPA, had become convinced that humanity was on the cusp of a computing revolution. 

“I think Tim Wu coming up with the name net neutrality was really brilliant because it sounds really good,” said the economist Michael Katz. “But it is a really bad idea at a fundamental level.” Katz, formerly chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission and now a Berkeley economics professor, thinks the internet should be regulated like most other parts of the economy.

One reason why network neutrality is such a big deal is that competition among broadband providers is more limited in the United States than it perhaps has to be. Other countries have found a way to create competition: forcing big internet service providers to sell access to the “last mile” of their infrastructure to other internet service providers.

The internet is dying. Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and you will still see your second cousin’s baby pictures. But that isn’t really the internet. It’s not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the product of technologies created over decades through government funding and academic research, the network that helped undo Microsoft’s stranglehold on the tech business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix.

The most obvious reason that network neutrality violations have been rare since Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent is that the Federal Communications Commission has enforced net neutrality rules since 2010 (aside from a year-long interlude without rules caused by a Verizon lawsuit). But to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, this just proves that the rules aren't necessary. "Because of the paucity of concrete evidence of harms to the openness of the Internet, the [2015 net neutrality] Order and its proponents have heavily relied on purely speculative threats," Pai's proposal says.

In addition to ditching its own network neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission also plans to tell state and local governments that they cannot impose local laws regulating broadband service. This detail was revealed by senior FCC officials in a phone briefing with reporters, and is a victory for broadband providers that asked for widespread preemption of state laws. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposed order finds that state and local laws must be preempted if they conflict with the US government's policy of deregulating broadband Internet service, FCC officials said.