Net neutrality rules deserve the nation’s attention, again
In a zero-attention-span society, even the most important issues slip out of mind when they drop from the headlines or get bumped from cable news. It’s happening right now with net neutrality — a critical issue that affects everyone who uses the internet that seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.
Last December, the Trump administration repealed President Obama’s net neutrality rules, setting off a firestorm of media attention and — if only briefly — focusing national attention on the need for clear rules ensuring that no internet company can block unpopular websites or unaffiliated services or otherwise discriminate online.
There was then a brief effort to revive the rules through a highly partisan longshot approach called the “CRA” that made some headway in the Senate but was always, as its sponsors knew too well, dead on arrival in the House of Representatives.
While well intentioned, it’s no surprise this CRA tactic could not gain a foothold. It fetishized an anachronistic “public utility” approach to net neutrality that many regarded as gratuitous overkill for a largely unregulated internet and a buzzkill for new investment. It also oddly paid worship to administrative regulations that change with every new administration rather than a permanent Congressional law. Even if it had succeeded, the Trump FCC could have altered them again. It’s kind of like that game of infinite regression.
In the meantime, the news cycle has churned on and net neutrality is like a forgotten summer romance. Many have started to believe it was all hype, drummed up by the professional consultant class to burnish their brands and raise funds, as the internet providers themselves have pledged to live by the rules even in their absence. Making sure they do now falls to the FTC as the honesty-in advertising cop on the beat.
As much as we should celebrate consensus — and there seems to be widespread agreement on net neutrality now — legislation still seems to be the obvious coda. Legislation is a kind of “trust but verify” insurance policy against a future provider that may want to, say, favor its new streaming service over those of, say, Netflix or Disney. But there are other reasons too — interfering with internet traffic to increase profits is not just a salon-dinner theoretical conversation about future misbehavior by internet providers, it’s a current day way-of-life for the Internet’s new gilded monopolies like Facebook and Google.
Those companies that collect and profile our data and decide what we can see and where we can go online pose a greater risk of censorship and manipulation of our data than anyone. Washington’s big thinkers in technology have come to the party late — after months of front page stories of how these companies facilitate election interference, hate, and civic chaos and marketplace tyranny that is stripmining our news, retail and creative industries.
Many of these leaders are now demanding that that net neutrality cover these Big Tech monopolies as well as internet providers — something only a new law from Congress can effectively ensure. It would seem obvious to anyone watching the disintegration of the internet that there is a crisis too big to corporate promises or overworked regulators. Net neutrality for all goes to the basic ability of citizens to connect and communicate, to find meaningful information, to organize and participate in the political process in a fair and open way.
On a bipartisan basis, congressional inaction conjures images of Nero fiddling while the internet burns. There is little disagreement about net neutrality widely applied and little disagreement about reining in abuses that lead to the Russia scandal, among others. It’s up to party leadership on both sides to prove, contrary to growing populist sentiment in both camps, that they are not made up of decaying old politicians but rather modern problem solvers up to the task of protecting the most important communications medium of our time.
Poll after poll shows that this is what the public wants by large margins. But the permanent Washington set has been more interested in trying to leverage these poll numbers to make political hay. But that’s the politics of cynicism that only fuels resentment of Washington and the spoilation of the internet.
There is a huge middle ground available here and a real opportunity for the kind of common sense problem solving Americans routinely tell pollsters what they want. It’ll only happen if we drop the political jawboning and get on with the peoples’ business.