The FCC Net Neutrality ruling: A brief review
PDF of the FCC Net Neutrality Ruling
I decided to read through the 107-page FCC Net Neutrality ruling when it came out on October 22, 2009, mainly because of the gloom and doom that Glenn Beck was espousing about it. I listen to Glenn frequently, but I’ve become increasingly more questioning of some of the things he says.
After reading through most of the Net Neutrality ruling I can say for a fact that the document does nothing to explicitly limit freedom of speech. In fact, from the outset, it appears to increase opportunities for expressing one’s freedom of speech.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I currently work as a customer support specialist for Megagate Broadband, a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC). I read through the FCC document also out of professional curiosity of what it might mean for the industry in which I work. There were a couple of areas that stood out to me when viewed from this perspective.
Section 92, Rule 3 states: “Subject to reasonable network management, a provider of broadband Internet access service may not prevent any of its users from connecting to and using on its network the user’s choice of lawful devices that do not harm the network.” My concern here is that companies like Megagate that supply customers with a broadband modem that’s actually being leased to them (as a part of their normal monthly service), would be required to allow customers to not only hook up their own modems but be required to supply them their login info for that modem. This could at worst present a security concern, or at best present a troubleshooting headache in the inevitable event that a customer accidentally changed their login settings and could no longer connect to the network. In either case, the price of the service would undoubtedly increase to account for the increased workload in dealing with the new problems.
The other area that concerns me the most is Section 104, Rule 5: “Subject to reasonable network management, a provider of broadband Internet access service must treat lawful content, applications, and services in a nondiscriminatory manner.” Mainly I’m interested in seeing if this rule would be approved (currently it’s just a suggested one), and how it would be applied if approved. My concern with it is how they would define “reasonable network management” and “nondiscriminatory manner”. The concern I have is that ISPs would be obligated to allow competing services (such as VoIP or IPTV) to push enough traffic across the network that it would be to the detriment of other non-competing traffic (e.g. streaming music, cloud services, web hosting).
I, along with others, question whether the FCC even has the authority to traverse into the realm of regulating the Internet.
Even with this ruling from the FCC, the debate about Net Neutrality is far from over and I’ll be paying attention to the direction in which it heads. The ramifications from a poorly implemented solution would be huge and quite damaging to the progress that the Internet and the World Wide Web have caused in our country for the past nearly twenty years.
There is a time and place for government to get involved, and I dont think this is one of them. I largely agree with Ron Paul’s take on the issue: that the free market should decide.
In the bad ole’ days of the internet, the big online services such as Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc offered a type of filtered access to the internet along with their own premium content. With net neutrality laws, this would have been illegal. It didn’t take an act of congress for this model to fail, competition killed it instead.
The ubiquitous $20 per month unlimited access ISP was everywhere and the large services could not compete. I think that would be the case today if network providers attempted to limit or favor certain types of traffic. Competition would arise and offer an alternative to which people would flock.
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