Don’t roll back restraints on Internet service providers
For the most part, the Internet has been a marvelous invention.
It has produced one great digital service after another — email, the World Wide Web, streaming, search and social media, to name a few. Five of the world’s most valuable companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook — all reside in and around the Internet.
But this remarkable ecosystem has always had a weak link: the Internet service providers (mainly cable and telephone companies) that dominate the business of running data into homes and businesses. The ISPs are better known for their escalating prices than they are for innovation or customer service.
For the past two decades, they have been lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to hand them control of the Internet. While it pains us to say it, they are on the verge of succeeding. As early as today, the FCC is planning to begin the process of turning them from common carriers into gatekeepers and toll collectors.
From its origins, the Internet has thrived under the principle of network neutrality. That is, the companies that control the physical conduits over which content travels could not use that power to give faster download speeds or otherwise favor certain content. Put another way, they couldn’t erect toll booths on the information superhighway.
America likely never would have had an Internet had the dialup networks of its early days not been regulated as common carriers that could charge by volume of traffic but had no stake in what they carried.
In the broadband age, it would be hard to imagine the kind of streaming from the likes of Netflix and Amazon that Americans have come to enjoy had service providers been able to impose their will. At the very least, consumers would have been forced to pay more to account for the piece of the action that service providers would have demanded from streaming companies, and perhaps even from movie and television producers.
Absent net neutrality, the broadband Internet would have looked a lot like cable television. For that reason, the FCC in 2015 decided to formalize the idea of net neutrality from guiding principles to hard and fast rules.
But the Trump administration’s FCC, chaired by a former lawyer for Verizon, is determined to undermine these principles and write new rules that allow the service providers to, in effect, force themselves into partnership with content companies.
Some cynics argue that this is all a minor tempest because the Internet itself is not the competitive cauldron it once was.
Indeed, two companies, Google and Facebook, account for an astounding two-thirds of all digital advertising revenue. And companies such as Amazon, Netflix and Apple have come to dominate the distribution of premium entertainment content.
New companies will emerge to challenge the incumbents. In fact, someone might invent a whole new paradigm for using the Internet. But that can happen only if the Internet remains the Internet, which increasingly looks like a shaky proposition.