It's not Metrocast it's the Guberment!
On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission – the government department charged with regulating the U.S. broadcasting and telecommunications industries – approved new net neutrality regulations, marking the agency’s first major step toward regulating the Internet.
The story of the Internet is a tale of a network of communities that developed organically and coalesced to form a virtual society – with its own rules and norms – where social status could be formed based on the merits of one’s ideas, instead of traditional class structures.
Initially competing with services like AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, the Internet came to be the dominant network because it was based on open standards, which could be used by anyone to create new products and services.
Many western governments, including the United States, initially took a hands-off approach to regulating the Internet. This policy helped foster a network in which ordinary people could freely debate issues and ideas, without being hampered by the limitations imposed by traditional types of media that only give a voice to a select few. The lack of regulation also meant that techies and entrepreneurs were able to innovate and create services that could compete in a truly free market.
The result has been truly astounding. Technological innovations such as the world wide web, e-mail, streaming video, Internet telephony, online shopping, and social networking have had a profound impact on the way we live our lives. Given the outstanding success of this largely unregulated medium, it is no wonder that previous attempts at imposing top-down controls over the Internet have been met with stiff opposition, especially from people who witnessed the bottom-up development of online communities.
The first major attempt by the U.S. government to enforce state control came in the form of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Part of the Act, which was later struck down on first amendment grounds, tried to impose decency and obscenity standards, similar to those required of broadcast television stations.
In response, Grateful Dead lyricist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow said it was time to “dump some tea in the virtual harbor” and penned what he called, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”
“Governments of the Industrial World…… On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather,” he wrote. “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”
Government, however, does not like things it can’t control and for the past decade the FCC has been looking for an opening. Just as advocates of central planning use global warming as a means to impose government intrusion into the economy, regulatory bodies such as the FCC are using the issue of net neutrality to support their agenda.
In a press release about Tuesday’s decision, the FCC says it acted to “preserve the Internet as an open network enabling consumer choice, freedom of expression, user control, competition and the freedom to innovate.” But the Internet is already free and even if some of these core values of the Internet were under threat, freedom is not something imposed by government. It is something that needs to be protected from government.
Net neutrality advocates argue that while any information sent over the Internet has historically been given the same priority, new technologies have given Internet Service Providers (ISPs) the means to evaluate and discriminate against the different pieces of information being sent over the network (known as traffic management practices). They worry that companies will use this power to begin charging for preferential access to certain sites and services, which would have a detrimental effect on innovation and freedom of speech.
This argument is not without merit. Part of the reason the Internet has been so successful is its neutrality. Government websites are given the same priority as personal blogs and new technologies can compete on an equal playing field. If some sites were sped up at the expense of others and some pieces of software were given preference over others, it would certainly threaten technological innovation and free expression.
But the FCC’s new policy is largely a solution to a hypothetical problem. There have been few examples of companies engaging in this type of behaviour and certainly nothing on the scale of slowing down huge swaths of the Internet.
The FCC also has an incentive to expand its mandate. Originally intended to regulate broadcasters, it has been working hard to extend its reach to cover cable, satellite, and Internet companies as well. And if Republicans are unable to pass legislation that stops the FCC from regulating the Internet, it likely won’t stop here. There have already been calls for neutrality regulations to be applied, not just to ISPs, but to search engines, devices, and applications as well.
The FCC has framed its decision in the rhetoric of “freedom,” “openness,” and “competition.” This should not fool anyone. As the history of the Internet shows, free speech and free markets take place in the absence of government coercion. Imposing more controls on the Internet will have the opposite effect.
Read more:
Jesse Kline: FCC imposes net restrictions and calls it freedom | Full Comment | National Post
