Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

Taking Sides On Net Neutrality

  

     Well that didn’t take long.

     Almost immediately after the midterm elections, President Obama, no longer needing to be concerned about his party’s election chances, stepped out of his bunker and started presidenting again.

     His first move: a statement pushing the FCC to reinstate the rules of net neutrality and officially recognize the Internet as a public utility.

     I’ve written about net neutrality before, but I’ll give you a refresher anyway.

     The basic idea of net neutrality is that all information on the Internet is treated equally. Whether you’re shopping online, streaming a YouTube video, looking up something on Wikipedia, or downloading a video game, all of that data is the same.

     Internet service providers (ISP) however, would very much like to be able to identify which data is going where, and then charge not just the receiver, but the sender as well.

     For example, digital versions of Mid-America Publishing’s many fine newspapers are available online. Now imagine if a snowbird went to Arizona for the winter, where Comcast is the only real option for Internet, and discovered that web-pages from Mid-America Publishing’s sites were taking an infuriatingly long time to load even though the snowbird was already paying top dollar for sufficient Internet speeds.

     Well, it could be that Comcast had decided to throttle web content from Mid-America Publishing to Comcast customers, and would only stop if Mid-America Publishing agreed to pay Comcast what is essentially a ransom.

     Replace “Mid-America Publishing” with “Netflix” and that’s exactly what happened earlier this year. And that’s exactly what Comcast would like to do to everybody. Pay extra for the “fast lane” or they will throttle, if not outright block, your website.

     So the President has called for some simple rules that net neutrality advocates have been pushing for years. No blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization.

     These things are no-brainers, and to prove that point, Texas Senator Ted Cruz reflexively took to Twitter to proclaim his opposition, saying, “Net Neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.”

     This tweet is funny for two reasons. Well, two reasons beyond the fact that Ted Cruz clearly has no idea what Net Neutrality is other than something that telecom companies paid him $50,000 last year to oppose.

     The first is that Ted Cruz’s go-to platform to denounce the idea that the Internet should be treated as a public utility was… the Internet.

     The second is that while Cruz opposes the idea of the Internet running at the speed of government, in reality, we should be so lucky.

     Now yes, I know he’s actually talking about the speed at which he does (or doesn’t do) his own job, but when it actually comes to bandwidth, government networks blow for-profit networks clear out of the water. Here in Iowa, the primary barrier keeping the Iowa Communications Network (ICN) from public use is the fact that local competition simply would not be able to compete with the state-run fiber optic network.

     But back to net neutrality, which is so popular, even among Republicans, that it’s almost strange Obama didn’t make this statement sooner in order to bait some unforced errors out of the opposition party.

     However, this issue ultimately won’t be decided by President Obama or Ted Cruz. It’ll be decided by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who has the unenviable task of creating a set of rules for the Internet that won’t invoke the wrath of an unending army of lawyers from the telecom industry. Like dealing with children negotiating against bedtime, Wheeler has to consider how much screaming from the telecoms he is willing to put up with in order to enforce his policy.

     Title II of the Telecommunications Act could classify the Internet as a public utility. It’s the “nuclear option,” it won’t make the telecom industry happy, it certainly won’t be the end of the debate, but it would undoubtedly give the FCC the authority to put net neutrality rules back in play.

     But whether it’s done via Title II or not, one can only hope that Wheeler finds a way to re-establish net neutrality rules. The future of the Internet may depend on it.

 

     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is glad Comcast and Time Warner don’t operate here.

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