FREE SPEECH IN DANGER

Cyber protest urges innovation

On Wednesday, you may go to your favorite website and see a pop-up window that claims the site has been blocked, that it’s “stuck in the slow lane” or now requires a subscription.

Don’t be alarmed: This is the internet’s version of a protest, and it’s fighting for the cyber version of free speech, commonly called net neutrality.

Then again, do be alarmed: There’s a good chance that federal regulators will dismantle the current framework that allows for net neutrality, and that they’ll do so without any replacement mechanism to enforce an open internet.

People who would like to change the way we regulate the internet argue that the current method has stifled innovation since it went into effect two years ago.

That idea is hard to square with the fact that the companies participating in this week’s protest are the innovators. Some on the list include Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, Google, Vimeo and Reddit.

But here’s where it gets more complex. One argument of net neutrality opponents is: If broadband internet service providers like Comcast could charge higher fees for the biggest bandwidth hogs (cough cough, Netflix; cough, Amazon), wouldn’t they be able to afford to build advanced fiber networks that would spawn new types of innovation? I’ll leave you to consider this idea that ISPs are too cashpoor to innovate.

Backing up a bit, net neutrality is the idea that the internet is a cyber piazza, an open forum for debate and innovation, where giants like Google, Netflix and Facebook have no inherent advantage over startups and newcomers.

Unlike actual public piazzas, the cyber forum for debate and speech is reliant on a delivery infrastructure, and that infrastructure is populated by profit-driven monopolies. ISPs built the roads that lead to the cyber piazza, and they installed giant toll booths aka monthly subscriptions. So net neutrality rules are really just rules that apply to them. The idea is that Comcast shouldn’t be able to charge a higher toll for Netflix than for its own subsidiaries.

The current head of the Federal Communications Commission has said he wants to preserve net neutrality, just not in its current form. Yet the FCC plans to slash Title II, the legal foundation for net neutrality. In 2015, former President Barack Obama asked the FCC to classify ISPs as utilities that the federal government could regulate. The impending regulations barred ISPs from blocking or throttling websites, favoring certain content over others, and more.

Opponents argue that Title II is antiquated because it originated in the 1930s. I’m not sure what’s wrong with old laws, but I do know that a bunch of pop-up windows and shut-down websites probably isn’t going to change what is a foregone conclusion at the FCC.

For it to be permanent, the road to net neutrality needs to be paved by innovators, not government. The Amazons and Googles and Facebooks need to develop and build that advanced fiber network that ISPs supposedly can’t afford. They need to do what they do best: disrupt industry through innovation. The giants can put their money where their protests are, and build new networks that make ISPs obsolete.

Bureaucrats don’t understand technology and government doesn’t move fast enough to regulate it. These people know not what they do or say, as evidenced by our commander in chief’s weird announcement about forming an “impenetrable Cyber Security unit” with Russia yesterday.

I think this is cluelessness, not malevolence. And the only way to fight it is through innovation.