Comcast Sees The Downside To Winning Their Net Neutrality Case
Art Brodsky offers some good insights on the potentially larger and longer term ramifications of the FCC-Comcast court ruling.
By winning as big as it did, the result of Comcast’s case was that the FCC has, practically speaking, been stripped of its ability to regulate high-speed Internet access (broadband) services. That means if Comcast decided once again to throttle back the Internet traffic of its subscribers, consumers would have little to no recourse. There is no agency, no authority, which could look into a complaint and risk doing anything about it. Practically speaking (even if there is a very slim legal opening), broadband is free from regulation, a nirvana that the telecoms industry might once upon a time have gratefully accepted as its due, but now looks upon it with some trepidation because now the door has swung wide open to a full-scale discussion of bringing Internet broadband access services back under reasonable regulation.
Digital services offered by telephone companies were offered under regulations until 2005, continuing a line of consumer protections reaching back to 1934. Then it reclassified those digital services into the virtually deregulated bucket of “information services.” It was the FCC’s decision not to put the then-new cable modem service into that same regulatory bucket in 2002 that started the whole mess we find ourselves in today.
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The companies want to define their own obligations and then enforce them at their whim. Suppose someone wanted to add another principle to the ones that the FCC, thanks to the legal actions of Comcast, can’t enforce? Let’s say someone wanted to prohibit Internet access companies from discriminating against Web sites on the basis of financial relationships. Or let’s say telephone or cable companies moved all their popular services into a more expensive “managed” category, just like a cable network? What could consumers do under the KOS theory? Nothing. And if you have no choice of provider, you’re out of luck. But the free market has provided you at least with something, so be grateful, even if the companies with virtually no regulation have led the U.S. consistently downward in the Internet rankings since the deregulation of the past few years, with service more expensive and slower, with fewer choices for consumers than in comparable countries.
Don’t buy the argument that new regulation will screw up investment. Companies invest more or less depending on their business plans. With little to no regulation, Verizon will restrict its FIOS fiber service to about half of its customers. AT&T hasn’t deployed any fiber to the home.
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We need not have, as some commentators call it, the same rules that applied to the monopoly telephone network. On the other hand, some of the same principles, like non-discrimination, should exist regardless of the technology. The regulation of telephone companies existed as the technology evolved from the 1930s through the 2000s. It’s flexible and dynamic enough to protect Internet access. The regulatory system that could be put in place would be similar to that in place in the 1990s when, under the Clinton Administration, there were thousands of Internet Service Providers which leased access to telephone company lines and provided new services and choices to millions of consumers. Sadly, that competition was wiped out through the deregulation which followed.
