Regulatory classification

Even though our net neutrality policies are now legally viable and wildly popular, the leadership at the Commission wants to revisit Internet openness. It has started a proceeding that tears at the foundation of net neutrality. It has proposed cutting the rules we have and instead offering our broadband providers the power to favor sites, content, and ideas; the power to discriminate with our traffic; and the power to become censors and gatekeepers for all that is online. If you want an example, look no further than what happened during the last 14 days with the #MeToo movement.

We are weeks away, from broadband providers being given the green light, to freely engage in paid prioritization, blocking, throttling, or unreasonable discrimination at interconnection points. We are weeks away from the probability, of an entirely new and even wider divide – of those that can afford to pay for priority access, and others that cannot.

[Commentary] The exchange of information and ideas that takes place on the internet is more important now than ever. To protect it, we need to keep the current network neutrality rules in places. We need them to ensure that people working to make the world better can reach their intended audiences. We need them to ensure that artists everywhere continue to have a platform through which we can discover their work. Right now, the internet is a level playing field. The question the Trump administration needs to answer is: Why would you want to change that?

Equal protection of data under the law could be removed from the internet for US users. At a recent Keweenaw County Board meeting, Pasty.Net president Charles Hopper discussed the probability that net neutrality laws would be repealed in November by the Federal Communications Commission. Hopper offered one example of the burdens placed on his company as a result of being placed under Title II.

ADT filed a letter to urge the Federal Communications Commission to maintain core net neutrality protections for alarm providers, including preventing blocking or throttling and precluding anticompetitive prioritization schemes. ADT asserted the FCC has ancillary jurisdiction to adopt these specific net neutrality protections based on the FCC’s mandated responsibility in Section 275 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

[Commentary] Those who look at Washington and see only gridlock and bickering should look to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as an exception. By implementing improved transparency and review processes in the past months, the FCC has achieved far more transparency than ever before. A shining example of improved transparency at the Commission is the current review of regulations that are hindering innovation and investment through policies tethered to the past.

The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on network neutrality and the role of antitrust for Nov 1. The Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law, which will hold the hearing, has not released details, but the event is likely to address concerns that internet service providers stifle competition. The hearing comes as Republicans in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put their finishing touches on a plan to scrap net neutrality. The agency has not released a timeline for when it will release and vote on the final version of Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to roll back the rules, but telecommunication insiders speculate that a vote could come as soon as December.

[Commentary] Here are just a few ways internet service providers (ISPs) have throttled or blocked content in the past:
Packet forgery: In 2007 Comcast was caught interfering with their customers’ use of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing
Discriminatory traffic shaping that prioritizes some protocols over others: a Canadian ISP slowed down all encrypted file transfers for five years
Prohibitions on tethering: the Federal Communications Commission fined Verizon for charging consumers for using their phone as a mobile hotspot
Overreaching clauses in ISP terms of service, such as prohibitions on sharing your home Wi-Fi network
Hindering innovation with "fast lane" discrimination that allows wireless customers without data plans to access certain sites but not the whole Internet
Hijacking and interference with DNS, search engines, HTTP transmission, and other basic Internet functionality to inject ads and raise revenue from affiliate marketing schemes, from companies like Paxfire, FairEagle, and others
Individually and collectively, these practices pose a dire threat to this purely democratic engine of innovation that has allowed hackers, startups, and kids in their college dorm rooms to create the free Internet that we know and love today.

[John Ottman is Chairman and co-founder of Minds, Inc. a social media network.]

[Commentary] Handing the network neutrality problem over to a government agency with strong industry ties and poor mechanisms for public accountability poses a real danger of creating more problems than we’d solve. One alternative is to foster a genuinely competitive market for Internet access. If subscribers and customers had adequate information about their options and could vote with their feet, internet service providers (ISPs) would have strong incentives to treat all network traffic fairly. But the ISP market today is under oligopoly control. Nearly one in three American households have no choice when it comes to their Internet, and for all the other consumers choices are quite limited.

Another scenario would be for Congress to step in and pass net neutrality legislation that outlines what the ISPs are not allowed to do. But fighting giant ISP mega-corporations (and their army of lobbyists) in Congress promises to be a tough battle. Yet another option: empower subscribers to not just test their ISP, but challenge it in court if they detect harmful non-neutral practices. That gives all of us the chance to be watchdogs of the public interest, but it too, is likely to face powerful ISP opposition.

[John Ottman is Chairman and co-founder of Minds, Inc. a social media network.]

House Commerce Committing Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) says top edge player online content management policies are not "neutral," a charge that comes as the network neutrality debate continues to rage on. “With a goal of ad clicks or driving page views, these companies’ policies are not neutral; they actively shape content on the web," said Ranking Member Pallone. That came in a request for a meeting with representatives of those edge giants about how they police content on their sites as social media's role in fake news and Russian election meddling becomes grows as a focus of Hill attention. It also is a response to reports of vague, confusing, and inconsistently applied content guidelines.

Usually, ISPs have been targeted for net neutrality criticisms, but increasingly edge providers are at least at the edges of the conversation on Capitol Hill, and Pallone, along with the committee Democrats of which he is the leader, is clearly trying to include tech companies in conversations about their role in net neutrality and the First Amendment going forward.