If you’ve been paying attention, you may have heard that the FCC did a bad thing. That is conceivably an arguable perspective, though one with which I am wholly sympathetic.
Much of the caterwauling in response has been focused on our Internet (this very one, yes) and how it will be affected. While there may be reasons to expect the worst effects never to appear, this is something that concerns me greatly as well.
But I want to take a step away from the politics for a second, and look at technical minutiae.
I know, it’s not as baitworthy as Doom and Outage. But when you spend any amount of time interfaced with a bureaucracy of any complexity, you soon realize that everything is minutiae. Lucky for us, the relevant points have been thoroughly explicated in this 43-page diatribe against the FCC’s proposal (later to be referenced in a letter signed by pretty much everyone who invented any significant piece of the Internet itself). It’s well worth a read if you want to understand the technical points, but for the inevitable tl;dr:
Classifying Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Comcast or AT&T as Title II common carriers is the legal basis for enforcing net neutrality principles. Title II is basically saying, hey, you’re a telecommunications service. You have to do the things that telecommunications services do.
The proposal just passed by the FCC gets rid of the telecommunications classification by saying, actually, ISPs are information service providers. ISPs let you do all this stuff with information, like post things, and look at cat videos, so that’s fair, right?
If you read any part of the original comment, make it this gem illustrating why no, that’s not right:
[The FCC] confuses offering the capability to connect to a third-party service with offering the capability of the third-party service itself, and implies that because ISPs allow users to connect to third-party services of the users’ choosing, somehow it is the ISP itself that is offering that service. If the same flawed logic were applied to the telephone network, one would conclude that because Verizon’s customers can use their phones to order a pizza, it is Verizon (instead of the local pizza parlor) that is offering the capability for having pizza delivered. The same logic makes a media company of the US Postal Service merely because one may have magazines delivered by mail. The NPRM’s characterization of ISPs as offering the capabilities associated with the totality of available services on the Internet similarly defies common sense.
So regardless of what actual outcomes may ensue, the FCC’s stance is that—if we extrapolate from the hypothetical examples above—on a definitional level, your cell service provider is the entity that ought to be able to determine whether that 3 pizza deal at Domino’s is still good when you phone in for delivery.
Also, from our examples, it seems clear to the FCC that it is within the purview of the US Postal Service exactly how many Amazon packages it will deliver each month to your doorstep before hitting some new limit. Sorry, Prime members.
And now, if the Title II repeal goes into effect, it is your ISP that is the one who may pass judgement on the websites and internet services that it transmits to you, potentially throttling, altering, or blocking content from third parties.
Don’t even ask yourself whether that’s a good or bad thing. Don’t even ask how likely it is to happen. Just ask, is this what the Internet is?