Now that the FCC pulled the trigger on Net Neutrality the ISPs are lining up to respond with lawsuits challenging the authority of the FCC. Again.
It was inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less sad and unfortunate. What the ISPs and the anti-Net Neutrality crowd seem to forget, though, is that Net Neutrality didn’t occur in a vacuum and it didn’t have to be this way.
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, wrote a blog post explaining why he is opposed to the direction the FCC has taken. Prince is definitely in a place to understand the pros and cons of the Net Neutrality debate and he makes a number of very good points on both sides of the equation. Ultimately, however, I disagree with his position because his vision for how the FCC should have handled things seems to conveniently forget the last five years or so of Net Neutrality history.
In Prince’s vision FCC chairman Tom Wheeler should have given a speech outlining the critical importance of the Internet to our culture and economy. He says that the FCC should have expressed concern about the potential for abuse from ISPs, and used the threat of its Title II authority as leverage to keep ISPs in line. Specifically, Prince believes the FCC should have laid out these ground rules for ISPs:
· Providers should not discriminate against or for any byte flowing across their network
· Providers should continue to invest in their networks to provide higher quality of service across the entire Internet
· Providers should not offer so-called “fast lanes” that content providers may purchase in order to favor their own content
That sounds idyllic—a truly Utopian vision for how the Internet should be managed. It also sounds familiar, both because it’s the way things were managed for years without the need for spelling it out or threatening ISPs, and because it’s the exact strategy the FCC already spent years trying to implement only to be challenged by ISPs and shot down in federal court.
It didn’t have to come to this. We shouldn’t need the FCC to crack the Title II whip. All of that is true, and it would still be true if the ISPs weren’t acting like greedy, petulant children.
That Utopian Internet worked just fine until the ISPs woke up one day and decided to dissect what actual rules exist and whether or not the FCC has any actual authority. At the point that ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon chose to nit-pick the letter of the law rather than cooperatively following the spirit of the law they forced the FCCs hand and drove us to this point. If the ISPs insist on pointing out that the FCC lacked authority under the previous status quo, then the FCC has no choice but to throw down the Title II gauntlet and claim the authority it rightly deserves. The ISPs dug this grave.
There’s a lot of talk about whether or not the FCC has the authority to do what it has done—and the current round of lawsuits should serve to clarify the point. It is interesting to me that these same people had no issue with the FCC’s authority to declare Internet providers outside of the scope of Title II, yet have no qualms claiming it lacks the authority to undo an arbitrary decision it made in the first place.
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Original URL: article on forbes >>
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Original Author Name: Tony Bradley, Contributor
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