FCC rolls out plan to undo Internet rules
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai released a controversial plan Tuesday that would change the way the federal government regulates Internet service providers. The plan, expected to win approval in December, would roll back Obama-era rules on net neutrality, which aimed to ensure that companies like Comcast and Verizon treat all data equally across their networks, regardless of the content or sender.
Consumer advocates see the FCC’s move as a blow, as do Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Netflix, which fear that the rollback could mean that the Internet providers charge more to speed their content across the providers’ wires. Small content companies worry that they could get squeezed out in a price war if the Internet service providers require companies to pay more.
Ending net neutrality would be “terrible for consumers,” said Ernesto Falcon, a legislative attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “It will give companies
free rein to discriminate (against certain content) by allowing the Internet service providers to cut special deals with big companies.”
Pai says there is little evidence to support such fears, and the debate shows that we have yet to determine how to fundamentally approach cyberspace.
In 2015, the FCC issued the rules because it feared that providers could give faster speeds to larger corporations who paid them more for network access, shutting out smaller competitors. Theoretically, service providers could also charge higher prices to consumers who want to see content originally confined to slower speeds.
In undoing those rules, Pai is essentially saying such preventive laws amount to regulatory paranoia. The rules — a solution in search of a problem — will only hurt innovation by drowning companies with unnecessary red tape, he said.
But Pai’s deregulatory, hands-off approach seems a bit outdated. After all, we are now witnessing the very real threats the broader Internet poses to our democracy and economy.
Companies like Google and Amazon are increasingly amassing enormous market power. And U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia spread misinformation through Facebook and Twitter to influence last year’s presidential election. These events are not directly related to net neutrality, but they create an environment that screams for government attention.
“The debate over net neutrality is not going to end until Congress says what the FCC can or can’t do,” said Larry Downes, project director of the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy in Washington. “The last time Congress did anything was 1996 (with the landmark law that deregulated the telecom industry). We’re just going to keep going back and forth with these issues.”
For example, Pai suggested Tuesday that the Federal Trade Commission, not the FCC, should be responsible for policing the industry and protect consumers.
“As a result of my proposal, the Federal Trade Commission will once again be able to police ISPs, protect consumers, and promote competition, just as it did before 2015,” he said in a statement. “Notably, my proposal will put the federal government’s most experienced privacy cop, the FTC, back on the beat to protect consumers’ online privacy.”
Proponents of net neutrality say the FTC is ill-equipped for the task. For one thing, it’s not clear whether the FTC even has the authority to regulate companies that offer both phone and Internet service. And the agency can only issue enforcement actions on individual cases brought by consumers against companies.
In other words, the burden falls onto the consumer to alert the agency about wrongdoing.
“The average American is not going to be familiar with the process,” Falcon of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. “It’s a lot of work to file a complaint with the FTC.”
Moreover, the FCC can issue rules that the entire industry must follow, which would prevent fraud. The FTC doesn’t have such broad power, which means the agency can act only after a company commits a violation.
“These cases would have to be brought one at a time, which favors the broadband providers,” Anant Raut, a former FTC attorney and antitrust lawyer in the Justice Department, wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill, “as opposed to the consumer-friendly way it works now, when the blanket prohibition prevents the activity from occurring in the first place. Eliminating net neutrality’s bright-line rules would shift the burden of enforcement against multibilliondollar corporations onto beleaguered consumers.”
We understandably harbor deep ambivalence about the Internet’s reach and power. But while net neutrality might have been an abstract term just a few years ago, our increasing dependence on the technology means a strict hands-off approach is wildly unrealistic and naive.
Sooner or later, all technology gets regulated. It’s just a question of how and when.