The Debate Over Net Neutrality

Should the government change a system that might not be broken?
While we are frequently reminded of the strong Republican opposition in Congress to Obama’s Jobs Bill, health care reform, and a wealth of other Democrat-proposed legislation, we are only recently hearing much about the issue of net neutrality. Net neutrality is the tenant that all people should have equal access to the internet. In Dec. 2010, the FCC adopted regulations to enforce net neutrality, which the Republicans are now attempting to nullify via the Congressional Revision Act. The Republican effort will likely go to vote on the Senate floor this Thursday.
The current FCC rules, which are set to go into effect on Nov. 20, ensure that internet service providers (ISPs) do not discriminate based on content. If the FCC rules are allowed to be enacted, an ISP will not be permitted to block any legal content from its subscribers, meaning it must deliver all types of content without any discrimination. Comcast, for example, will not be allowed to block websites that compete with its On Demand video service, such as Netflix. Likewise, if an ISP is partnered with Yahoo, it will not be allowed to slow down the delivery of search results from Yahoo’s competitors.
The Republican-backed Resolution of Disapproval is being matched by Democrats in Congress. Sen. John Kerry emerged last week as a leading defender of net neutrality when he wrote in an open letter that “if the effort is successful, it will stifle innovation and discourage investment in the next potential Google or Amazon.” Additionally, Obama made the importance of net neutrality a campaign issue, which will further hinder Republican efforts to quash the FCC rules. He has already vowed to veto a house measure to nullify the FCC rules.
The Republican’s justify their opposition under the pretense that the FCC is exceeding its authority by attempting to control the way ISPs deliver content to their subscribers. Republicans are also concerned about the potential economic consequences of such regulations, as well as any foreseeable hindrances to investment or innovation in internet technologies that may result.
Outside the realm of legislature, the FCC is also facing serious legal pressure. Verizon has recently opened a lawsuit against the FCC, claiming that the FCC lacks the authority to regulate its operations as an ISP.
Regardless of political partisanship over the issue, net neutrality regulations would have notable technological implications. There are times when ISPs need to discriminate based on content. For example, in times of internet congestion ISPs reserve the right to slow down high-bandwidth data such as peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers and video streams from applications such as BitTorrent and Skype. When ISPs slow down data that is expensive and likely not essential, internet users can benefit from faster access to high priority data when internet traffic is high.
Wireless providers are especially vulnerable to technological limitations which could be imposed by net neutrality legislation. Because wireless internet is much less powerful than broadband, wireless providers must be even more judicious with bandwidth limitations. Because wireless internet services are an emerging market, the current FCC rules do not restrict them very aggressively, but a lawsuit from the D.C.-based Free Press is attempting to change this. The Free Press is suing the FCC in an attempt to increase the regulation of wireless providers to match their wired counterparts.
Google currently advocates against complete net neutrality, promoting a system in which ISPs reserve the technological freedom to discriminate between data types, but not between content providers. Using video data as an example, Google believes that if internet traffic is high, ISPs should be able to uniformly slow down video data, but not slow down video from one site more than from any other. Perhaps Congress could use this as a framework for reforming the FCC rules, rather than attempting to fully preserve them or rescind them altogether. One possible implementation of partial net neutrality would be to place a heavy burden on prosecutors to prove anti-competitive discrimination, while reforming the FCC rules to allow ISPs the freedom to discriminate for technical reasons.
Moreover, a survey of the internet today would perhaps reveal that now is not the time to enforce net neutrality by strictly regulating ISPs. Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a leading sponsor of the Resolution of Disapproval against the FCC rules, said that “the Internet is not broken and does not need fixing.” The internet today is still a hotbed of innovation, a robust economic engine, and a stronghold of free speech; few documented cases of legal content being restricted by ISPs actually exist. So when America has so many national challenges to be tackled, why try to fix the one thing we have that isn’t broken?