Today, the Federal Communications Commission will begin to decide the future of the internet by deciding whether it will make regulations to protect net neutrality. The Commission should insert itself into the debate to ensure the free growth of the Internet.
To date, the FCC relies on four non-binding principles when considering the Internet: Internet service providers cannot prevent consumers from accessing legal content, services, or applications on the Internet, and they cannot ban users from attaching non-harmful devices to the network.
During a speech at the Brookings Institution on September 21, Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed turning these into official regulations, as well as adding two further principles to ensure net neutrality: a fifth policy of non-discrimination, so that ISPs cannot discriminate against particular internet content or applications, and a sixth policy ensuring network management transparency.
ISPs have the capability to block and degrade legal traffic on their networks, and could therefore discriminate against competing services. It’s fairly easy to imagine a telecommunications provider like Comcast blocking or subtly impeding access to Hulu, or Verizon secretly choking the data transmission for Voice over Internet Protocol technologies like Skype. The sixth related policy would mean that ISPs must disclose their network management practices. Clearly, heavy-handed overregulation of network practices would not serve the interests of either consumers or providers, but ISPs should not be allowed to discriminate against certain types of content, as Comcast blocked peer-to-peer transmissions last year, without notifying subscribers, the public, or the FCC.
On October 5, at the Georgetown-hosted Future of Music Coalition’s policy summit, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) emphasized that the ISPs’ attempts to switch from a free market to a “pay-to-play” market—where individuals and small businesses are relegated to the slow lane, while large corporations can monopolize internet access by paying more for faster service—is equivalent to censorship, and could create a separate but unequal internet.
“As far as I’m concerned, free speech limited or free speech delayed are the same thing as free speech denied,” Franken said.
Georgetown University should join with the American Association of Universities in advocating a policy of net neutrality. Students also have the opportunity to impact the debate: legislation in both the Senate and the House could shore up the FCC’s proposed new regulations, which will certainly face legal challenges in the courts from ISPs. Get the message out to your representative: ISPs have no right to take away our legal rights in a forum as essential to democracy as the internet—the 21st century’s town square.
