Net
Neutrality, A New Flash Point for
Foes of Big Government
WASHINGTON (By Alex Altman, Time)
September 8, 2010
On a Thursday night in August, some
750 people crammed into a high
school auditorium in Minneapolis to
discuss the future of the Internet.
Most of them went to beseech members
of the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) to act to protect
Internet neutrality, the premise
that all data on the Web should be
treated equally. During the
three-hour forum, organized by the
pro-Net-neutrality coalition Save
the Internet, an array of speakers
warned that without safeguards in
place, corporate behemoths would cut
lucrative deals to prioritize some
kinds of content and throttle
others, turning themselves into the
unofficial gatekeepers of the
world's best leveling force. Net
neutrality, said Senator Al Franken,
is "the First Amendment issue of our
time."
In the weeks since Google and
Verizon published a controversial
proposal on the issue, Net
neutrality has become the newest
front in an ideological war waged by
the pricey lobbyists, paid
spokesmen, partisan media outlets
and Washington ward bosses who feast
on fractiousness. Relying on a now
familiar playbook, a tableau of
conservative interest groups has
used the specter of a so-called
government takeover of the Internet
to mobilize Tea Party organizations.
Liberal counterparts warn that
corporate bigwigs are trying to
cement their control of the Web at
your expense. Their sparring has
transformed a technical debate about
the architecture of the Web into one
of the pivotal issues in this fall's
midterm elections. "Net neutrality
has become a proxy fight for who you
hate more big corporations or big
government," says Larry Downes, a
nonresident fellow at Stanford Law
School's Center for Internet and
Society. "It works very nicely for
that pointless, unending argument.
The antigovernment people say [FCC
regulation would be] a takeover of
the Internet. Anticorporate people
say a deal between Google and
Verizon would ruin the Internet. And
they're both wrong."
When you boot up your browser, any
website you want to visit is allowed
to load at the same speed. That's
because Internet service providers
have so far (with a few exceptions)
hewed to the principles of Net
neutrality, which prevent them from
favoring some kinds of content over
others. But as demand for broadband
grows and mobile devices like the
iPhone and Blackberry become
ubiquitous, telecommunications
giants like Verizon, Comcast and
AT&T who have spent hundreds of
billions of dollars laying the pipes
through which data travels to your
computer are eager to refine their
business models. One way they could
do this is by ditching flatrate
access fees and installing virtual
tollbooths that would let customers
pay for access to faster speeds or
subscription content, much as cable
providers ask you to fork over extra
for channels like HBO. In a recent
Economist Intelligence Unit survey,
55% of mobile executives said
developing tiered pricing models was
the way forward in mature markets.
Advocates also warn that if Net
neutrality rules aren't codified,
service providers could strike pacts
to prioritize certain types of data
at the expense of others. For
example, Comcast could theoretically
agree to accelerate streaming video
footage for one network's television
programs, putting that channel's
competitor at a disadvantage. The
Google-Verizon framework opens the
door to prioritization on wireless
networks and carves out loopholes
for traditional, wired connection.
For Internet users, the upshot could
be higher costsparticularly because
they will be less insulated by
competition as demand for broadband
increases, says Susan Crawford, a
former White House technology
adviser and professor at Cardozo
School of Law. The FCC's National
Broadband Plan predicts that soon
just 15% of the U.S. will be able to
choose between top-speed carriers.
"This is the arms merchants of the
Internet making a deal that furthers
their own business interests,"
Crawford says.
Net-neutrality advocates argue that
the best way to keep the Internet
free and open is for the FCC to
assert its authority to regulate
broadband, a process known as
reclassification. Last month, a
conservative coalition free-market
think tanks, antitax and
antiregulation interest groups, Tea
Party leaders and an array of GOP
legislators banded together to
stanch the threat of FCC action. On
Aug. 11, they sent a letter blasting
the FCC for "relentlessly pursuing a
massive regulatory regime." The
missive, written by Kelly Cobb,
government-affairs manager for
Americans for Tax Reform, argued it
could usher in additional taxes for
consumers and companies, open the
door to price-setting, curb free
speech, slow Web-surfing speeds and
dampen private investment. "Managing
traffic online, which is what Net
neutrality would eliminate, is
actually a very good thing," he
says. "It equalizes everybody's
access to the Internet by ensuring
the on ramp isn't congested." One of
the damning adages about Net
neutrality, oft repeated among
opponents, is that it is "a solution
in search of a problem."
This argument resonates with Tea
Party leaders, who are leery of
government regulation. But in some
cases their passion for the topic
runs deeper than their knowledge of
it. "The Internet is beautiful,"
says Honey Marques, one of the Tea
Party leaders to sign the Aug. 11
letter. To her, Net neutrality is
"about the government trying to
control and regulate our free speech
and control everything that's
happening in our lives." Lisa
Miller, a Washington-area Tea Party
leader, says Net neutrality is the
government's attempt to control "who
should get access to the Internet
and at what price." When asked why,
she declined to comment further
because she didn't have the letter
she had signed to refer to at that
moment.
"Nobody called them on the phone and
said, Hey, you should really get
involved on this," says Cobb. "[But]
in the past couple of months this
has come up as a big issue for them
because they view it as the
government getting involved when it
doesn't need to." By framing Net
neutrality as more government
meddling as Glenn Beck did last
fall, when he called it a "Marxist"
ploy that would put a "boot on the
throat" of taxpayers conservative
groups have carved out an effective
wedge issue. "Net neutrality is not
a political question," says
Stanford's Downes. "It's a technical
question. Neither [side] really
gives a damn about Net neutrality.
They both are pursuing other agendas
and this is a convenient thing to
hang it on."
"We've definitely made it one of the
major issues for our folks," says
Phil Kerpen, vice president for
policy at Americans for Prosperity (AFP),
a conservative advocacy group based
in northern Virginia. "If we can't
protect the communications system in
our country from regulation, it
prevents us from getting our message
out on all these other public-policy
fights." Since the start of the
Obama Administration, AFP has fought
to foment opposition to the
Democratic agenda organizing
rallies to protest the stimulus
package, mounting a campaign to cast
doubt on the soundness of
climate-change science and funneling
health care talking points to the
Tea Party, who lend an aura of
grass-roots authenticity to the
anti-Obama cohort. In May, AFP spent
$1.4 million on a television ad that
painted the Internet as the next
domino to topple in a cascading
series of "government takeovers."
The group plans to make Internet
regulation one of the four pillars
of its fall messaging campaign,
along with government spending,
health care reform and cap and
trade.
Opponents of Net neutrality, says
Joel Kelsey, political adviser for
the liberal advocacy group Free
Press, "fall into two buckets. Some
are genuine Astroturf groups who
echo industry talking points with a
veneer of public interest, even
though they're funded by company
money. Then there's the very real
conservative philosophical
opposition." AFP declined to say
whether it received funding from
telecom companies, citing a policy
of protecting donors' privacy. But
as a nonprofit organization devoted
to enhancing free-market
opportunities, AFP has cemented its
stature and perhaps endeared
itself to donors by stirring fears
that Obama is driving a socialist
agenda.
Conservative groups like AFP say the
proper venue for a debate about the
Internet's rules of the road is not
the FCC but Congress. That may seem
odd, given that conservative groups
have been virulent in their
criticism of the body. But they may
be calculating that many lawmakers
are unwilling to bite the hand that
feeds them. Comcast has forked over
$6.9 million in lobbying in 2010,
while Verizon spent $4.4 million in
the second quarter alone. AT&T has
doled out more in political
donations than any other company
during the past 20 years, according
to the Center for Responsive
Politics. While the GOP has
spearheaded the antiregulatory
drive, Democrats have been big
beneficiaries of the telecom
industry's largesse. In May, a
coalition of 74 House Democrats
urged FCC chairman Julius
Genachowski not to regulate
broadband, which they argued would
"jeopardize jobs." Of that group, 58
had received substantial
contributions from broadband service
providers, according to a New York
Times analysis. A 2009
Net-neutrality bill stagnated, and
Senator John Kerry, chairman of the
communications subcommittee, has
argued that any effort to codify a
situation shrouded in uncertainty
would almost certainly languish in
this balkanized Congress.
Meanwhile, Net-neutrality advocates
have seen their alliances frayed by
overheated rhetoric. In late August,
Gun Owners of America, a Second
Amendment lobbying group that had
been a part of the coalition since
2006, severed ties with the Save the
Internet coalition to dissociate
itself from groups pushing FCC
regulation. Craig Fields, director
of Internet operations for Gun
Owners of America, says the
spotlight conservative media outlets
have trained on the issue had no
bearing on the decision. "The tail
did not wag the dog," Fields says.
But, he acknowledges, "It's fair to
say that at times we've had
difficulty explaining to our people,
who are conservatives and
libertarians and tend to have a
free-market approach, that we are
not in bed with George Soros and
MoveOn.org." In a season when
political argumentation can resemble
a game of Mad Libs played with a few
incendiary nouns, picking enemies
can be as important as picking
issues.
When the fight over Net neutrality
arrived in Minneapolis, Zach Segner,
25, showed up for the same reason as
everyone else: to protect the Web.
But his notion of how to accomplish
that task was vastly different from
that of most attendees. Thin and
unshaven, Segner wore a black "End
the Fed" T-shirt and unfurled a
tattered bedsheet spray-painted with
the dictum "Hands Off Our Internet."
"The Internet's working fine right
now," he said. He acknowledged he
didn't grasp the fine points of Net
neutrality, but said he cares deeply
about an open Internet and is leery
of the government wresting control
away from businesses to usher in a
"Chinese-style system." In some
ways, his ideals seemed to align
with those of FCC commissioner
Michael Copps. "The Internet was
born on openness, flourished on
openness and depends on openness for
its continued success," Copps told
the crowd. "I suppose you can't
blame companies for seeking to
protect their own interests. But you
can blame policymakers if we let
them get away with it."
And yet, even if Net neutrality is
as Al Franken said the First
Amendment issue of our time, for now
the FCC seems bent on minimizing its
explosiveness. On Sept. 1, the
agency announced it would extend the
public comment period to solicit
further debate on the topic
nudging the deadline for action past
November's midterm elections.
