New rules aimed at prohibiting broadband providers from becoming gatekeepers of Internet traffic now have just enough votes to pass the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday.
The rules would prohibit phone and cable companies from abusing their control over broadband connections to discriminate against rival content or services, such as Internet phone calls or online video, or play favorites with Web traffic.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski now has the three votes needed for approval, despite firm opposition from the two Republicans on the five-member commission. Genachowski’s two fellow Democrats said Monday they will vote for the rules, even though they consider them too weak.
The outcome caps a nearly-16-month push by Genachowski to pass “network neutrality” rules and marks a key turning point in a policy dispute that began more than five years ago.
“The open Internet is a crucial American marketplace, and I believe that it is appropriate for the FCC to safeguard it by adopting an order that will establish clear rules to protect consumers’ access,” Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat, said in a statement.
Yet many supporters of network neutrality are disappointed. Clyburn and the other Democrat, Michael Copps, both said the rules are not as strong as they would like, even after Genachowski made some changes to address their concerns.
That sentiment was echoed by some public interest groups on Tuesday.
“The actions by the Federal Communications Commission fall far short of what they could have been,” said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge. “Instead of strong, firm rules providing clear protections, the commission, created a vague and shifting landscape open to interpretation.”
A number of big Internet companies, including Netflix Inc., Skype and Amazon.com Inc., have previously expressed reservations about the proposal as well.
Meanwhile, even the weakened rules are likely to face intense scrutiny as soon as the Republicans take over the House next year.
The chairman’s proposal builds on an attempt at compromise crafted by outgoing House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., as well as a set of broad net neutrality principles first established by the FCC under the previous administration in 2005.
The rules would require broadband providers to let subscribers access all legal online content, applications and services over their wired networks — including online calling services, Internet video and other Web applications that compete with their core businesses.
But the plan would give broadband providers flexibility to manage data on their systems to deal with problems such as network congestion and unwanted traffic like spam as long as they publicly disclose their network management practices.
Senior FCC officials stressed that unreasonable network discrimination would be prohibited.
They also noted that this category would most likely include services that favor traffic from the broadband providers themselves or traffic from business partners that can pay for priority. That language was added to help ease the concerns of Genachowski’s two fellow Deomcrats.
The proposal would, however, leave the door open for broadband providers to experiment with routing traffic from specialized services such as smart grids and home security systems over dedicated networks as long as these services are separate from the public Internet.
Public interest groups fear that exception could lead to a two-tiered Internet with a fast lane for companies that can pay for priority and a slow lane for everyone else.
They are also worried that the proposal lacks strong protections for wireless networks as more Americans go online using mobile devices.
The plan would prohibit wireless carriers from blocking access to any websites or competing applications such as Internet calling services on mobile devices. It would require them to disclose their network management practices too.
But wireless companies would get more flexibility to manage data traffic as wireless systems have more bandwidth constraints than wired networks.
“Individuals who depend on wireless connections to the Internet can take no comfort in this half-measure,” said Joel Kelsey, political advisor for the public interest group Free Press.
Republicans, meanwhile, warn that the new rules would impose unnecessary regulations on an industry that is one of the few bright spots in the current economy, with phone and cable companies spending billions to upgrade their networks for broadband.
Burdensome net neutrality rules, they warn, would discourage broadband providers from continuing those upgrades by making it difficult for them to earn a healthy return on their investments.
Still, Genachowski’s proposal is likely to win the support of the big phone and cable companies because it leaves in place the FCC’s current regulatory framework for broadband, which treats broadband as a lightly regulated “information service.”
The agency had tried to come up with a new framework after a federal appeals court in April ruled that the FCC had overstepped its existing authority in sanctioning Comcast Corp. for discriminating against online file-sharing traffic on its network — violating the very net neutrality principles that underpin the new rules. Comcast argued that the service, which was used to trade movies and other big files over the Internet, was clogging its network.
To ensure that the commission would be on solid legal ground in adopting net neutrality rules and other broadband regulations following that decision, Genachowski had proposed redefining broadband as a telecommunications service subject to “common carrier” obligations to treat all traffic equally. But Genachowski backed down after strong opposition from the phone and cable companies, as well as many Republicans in Congress.
The head of the Federal Communications Commission has enough support to pass controversial new rules that will prohibit phone and cable companies from discriminating against or favoring Internet traffic flowing over their broadband networks.
More than a year after FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski pledged to put in place so-called “network neutrality” regulations, the agency is poised to adopt those rules at a meeting on Tuesday.
Although the two Republicans who sit on the five-member commission are firmly opposed to the plan, Genachowski’s two Democratic colleagues have both said they will vote to let the proposal pass. Those two Democrats, Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps, have both said they still have reservations about the rules, however.
Tim Wu’s “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” has been out for a few weeks now and has already become one of those books that prognosticators and opinionators feel obliged to respond to. It’s also a substantial and well-written account of the five major communications industries that have shaped the world as we know it: telephony, radio, movies, television and the Internet. Wu believes that all of these industries have moved through cycles of diversity and consolidation, and that if we think the Internet is immune to a takeover by some massive monopoly promising a more perfect (and more profitable) experience for users (and itself), then we should look to history, and think again.
For Internet pundits (whether amateur or professional), Wu’s book is required reading, but the average citizen may find it even more revelatory and rewarding. Maybe you know a little bit about the rise and fall of the studio system in Hollywood, or you get misty-eyed over the crazy but creative early years of radio, before major broadcasting networks took over. Anyone past the age of 30 probably has at least a hazy memory of Ma Bell being smashed into Baby Bells by the Department of Justice in 1984, and may even be aware that some people still regard this as a crying shame. And, of course, you all know that the Internet is radically, uncontrollably decentralized by virtue of its very structure: It was designed to survive a nuclear war, right?
In “The Master Switch,” Wu assembles all of these stories and reframes them as battles in a shifting landscape of high-stakes industrial warfare, from Ma Bell’s dastardly campaigns against small independent phone companies to the conquest of every aspect of the movie industry — from talent and production to distribution and theaters — by the ruthless moguls of the studios’ heyday. He scrutinizes the postwar years when AT&T was treated like a shadow agency of the federal government, and recounts how the Machiavellian head of RCA, David Sarnoff, double-crossed an idealistic old friend to suppress the introduction of FM radio (a technology whose capabilities have yet to be fully explored) for decades.
These industries — “the defining business ventures of our time,” according to Wu — “have from their inception been subject to the same cycle of rise and fall, imperial consolidation and dispersion.” Furthermore, “the time has come when we must pay attention” because we are now, with the Internet, “on the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has always begun to swing in the opposite direction — toward greater control and centralization.” And while Wu strives for balance, acknowledging that monopolies can provide seamless service, efficiency, high-quality content and sometimes even lower prices, his heart is clearly with the wild and woolly (if also sometimes scruffy) nature of the wide-open model that currently abides online.
The histories Wu relates are unexpectedly fascinating, partly because fierce conflicts make for good stories and partly because they invite us to imagine such scenarios as what the world might have looked like if Bell hadn’t postponed the introduction of innovations like voice mail, fax machines and modems for so long. Mammoth communications monopolies might be stable, Wu points out, and they do encourage the development of new ideas that stand a chance of enhancing their current business, as in corporate-sponsored hotbeds like Bell Labs. But they also reflexively shut down anything that threatens to usher in the “creative destruction” of true innovation. A form of irrational “paranoia” (Wu’s term) caused Bell to stifle the invention of magnetic recording tape by one of its engineers in the 1930s — somehow they thought it would “lead the public to abandon the telephone.”
The Internet is, of course, supposed to be different, with its ability to transmit all kinds of data without routing it through a central switchboard (the “Master Switch” of Wu’s title). But Wu sees potential peril coming from a few quarters. Google — which has become, effectively, the master switch through which many people negotiate with the Internet — could defy its famous motto and go evil should it ever decide its survival requires “integration and the elimination of whatever competition it has.” Apple, with the iPhone and iPad, devices that can run only Apple-approved apps, could use the seductive ease and aesthetics of such gadgets to maneuver itself into the role of content czar. And, above all, whoever owns the physical infrastructure through which we all connect to the Internet — in most cases, the cable companies — could decide to parlay that into control over what we see once we’re connected.
Wu, a prominent champion of net neutrality, proposes what he calls “a Separation Principle for the information economy.” He wants to see “those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools or venues of access … kept apart from one another.” He also wants the government to “keep its distance and not intervene in the market to favor any technology, network monopoly, or integration of the major functions of an information industry.” This portion of the book, because it’s theoretical and hypothetical, is considerably drier than the historical chapters, but since Wu sees the public and its notions of “information morality” as a key enforcer for his Separation Principle, most readers will be prepared to listen up.
Wu’s proposal is eminently reasonable — relying neither on the unfettered free market nor state management to fend off monopolistic schemes, but a flexible situation in which public authorities step in when needed to maintain the genuine competition that fosters innovation. Naturally, fundamentalists on either side will find much to criticize, and the book does contain a few errors. (He thinks Slate was “the first online magazine” — tsk tsk.) By necessity, Wu can’t provide in-depth histories of the ups and downs and ins and outs of all five of these complex communications industries. It’s precisely the economy and common sense of “The Master Switch” that makes it valuable to the non-wonk wondering how we got where we are today, and where we might be headed next.
Level 3 Communications, an Internet backbone company that will support Netflix’s movie streaming service next year, is complaining that cable giant Comcast wants money for the right to send data to its subscribers.
The company says the fee violates the principles of an “open Internet” and goes against the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rules preventing broadband Internet providers from favoring certain types of traffic.
However, the spat may be more reflective of the complicated commercial relationships of the Internet, where it’s not always clear who should be paying whom.
The charges come at a sensitive time for Comcast Corp., which is trying to get regulatory clearance to buy NBC Universal.
There’s no way to sugar-coat this: Since Tuesday, network neutrality isn’t quite dead, but may well be in a coma. That’s the only rational way to look at the results of the 2010 elections, which saw some of net neutrality’s major backers go down to defeat.
Network neutrality is the idea that your broadband Internet provider — almost always a local cable or phone company — isn’t making decisions about what you can use on the Internet. That is, your ISP should not decide which bits of data get to your computer in what order or at what speed, much less whether they will ever get there at all.
Among the most damaging congressional losses will take place with the departure of Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, who lost his reelection bid. No one in that chamber has a better grasp of technology issues, not even Silicon Valley’s representatives. Boucher wasn’t just a strong supporter of net neutrality on tech policy; as chair of the House Communications, Technology and Internet subcommittee he used his authority over tech policy in generally progressive ways. Democrats weren’t fully in support of net neutrality to begin with, but Republicans, ever-loyal to the big-money corporate interests, have decided that the duopoly is all the competition we need.
The robber barons who run our local telecom duopolies and the barely competitive mobile networks are surely thrilled with their good luck. They aren’t stupid enough to believe voters tossed out Boucher and other net-neutrality supporters on that issue alone, or that voters even gave it much thought, but they’ll definitely take advantage of the circumstances.
The Federal Communications Commission has been relatively timid on net neutrality, working mostly at the edges of the debate; witness its move to partially reclassify broadband service — a regulatory approach that would give the commission more authority to prevent carriers from discriminating against certain kinds of content. That’s a relatively timid move (though useful), but even this limited progress is under attack. And President Obama’s campaign promises to push hard for net neutrality seem hollow, at best.
Meanwhile, America falls further and further in the deployment of serious broadband. And the carriers are closer than ever to turning the Internet, which should be the most open of networks, into just another kind of cable television.
This is the fourth installment of The Influencers, a six-part interview series that Lynn Parramore, the editor of New Deal 2.0 and a media fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, is conducting for Salon. She recently talked to Internet activist and guru Eli Pariser, board president of MoveOn.org, who is currently writing a book exploring an invisible feedback loop he calls “the filter bubble.” They discussed the dangers of this trend, along with net neutrality and the future of the Web.
What is the filter bubble and why is it significant?
Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it’s also happening in a bunch of places where it’s much less visible.
For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you’ll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn’t true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google “BP,” one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else’s. And that’s what I’m calling the “filter bubble”: that personal ecosystem of information that’s been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.
Why is this dangerous?
We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it’s looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There’s a looping going on where if you have an interest, you’re going to learn a lot about that interest. But you’re not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won’t learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you’re not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn’t a link between vaccines and autism. It’s a feedback loop that’s invisible. You can’t witness it happening because it’s baked into the fabric of the information environment.
Is this the new narcissism?
Yeah, and you know, these filters are coming out for totally legitimate reasons. There’s a mass of information that we all have to deal with every day, way more than we can grapple with, and we need help. The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it’s about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days.
So there’s this enormous flood of bits, and we need help trying to sort through it. We turn to these personalization agents to sift through it for us automatically and try to pick out the useful bits. And that’s fine as far as it goes. But the technology is invisible. We don’t know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we’re actually interested in. At the end, it’s a set of code, it’s not a person, and it locks us into a specific kind of pixelated versions of ourselves. It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience. I don’t think with this information explosion that you can go back to an unfiltered and unpersonalized world. But I think you can bake into the code a sense of civic importance. You can have a sense that there are some things that we all need to be paying attention to, that we all need to be worried about, where you do want to see the top link on BP for everyone, not just investment information if you’re interested in investments.
How can we ensure that certain kinds of public information will be readily available to all users?
I think the change happens on a bunch of levels, and the first is on an individual level. You can make sure that you’re constantly seeking out new and interesting and provocative sources of information. Think of this as your information diet. The narcissistic stuff that makes you feel like you have all the right ideas and all the right opinions — our brains are calibrated to love that stuff because in nature, in normal life, it’s very rare. Now we have this thing that’s feeding us lots of calories of that stuff. It takes some discipline to forgo the information junk food and seek out stuff that’s a little more challenging.
So that’s one piece of it. I think the second piece is we’ve had institutions that have been mediating what we get to know for a long time. For most of the last century they were newspapers that produced about 85 percent of the news in that model. They were always commercial entities. But because they were making so much money, they were able to afford a sense of civics, a sense that the New York Times was going to put Afghanistan on the front page, even if it doesn’t get the most clicks.
So newspapers found this kind of happy medium that didn’t always work perfectly, but it worked better than the alternative. I think now the baton is passing to Google, to Facebook, to the new filters to develop the same kind of sense of ethics about what they do. If you talk to the engineers, they’re very resistant because they feel like this is just code, it doesn’t have values, it’s not a human thing. But of course they’re writing code, and every human-made system has a sense of values. And so, I think calling them to their civic responsibility is an important part of the puzzle.
There are some places where we need regulation. There’s the idea that people should be able to control how the information that they’re giving to websites is used and monetized in a more clear and powerful way. That’s something that probably will need government action. It could be something as simple as this: Instead of requiring sites to have privacy policies that customers agree to, you could pass a law that says, “Here’s a standard format by which customers can have their own policy for how they want their data used,” and sites essentially have to read that code and abide by it. That would change a lot of things, as opposed to having the hundred-page Apple terms of service agreement that I just got on my iPhone that nobody probably has ever read in its entirety.
Let’s turn to net neutrality. You’ve been at the forefront of harnessing the Internet in a way that allows ordinary people to participate in the political arena. Why is net neutrality important to a democracy?
It’s extremely important because the Internet was built on the principle that it would carry all different types of data. And it didn’t really care what kind of data it was carrying. It was going to make sure that it got from Point A to Point B. That’s the Internet: There’s kind of a social contract between all the machines on the Internet that says, “I’ll carry your data if you carry my data, and we’ll leave it to the people on the edges of the network — to your home PC or the PC that you’re sending something to — to figure out what the data means.” That’s the net neutrality principle. It’s really at the core of the founding idea of the Internet.
Now, big companies like Verizon and Comcast are looking at how the Internet is eroding their profit margins. They’re saying to themselves, what can we do to get a piece of this growing pie? They want a tiered Internet where you can pay them to go to the front of the line with your data. That will really erode that amazing thing we all know the Internet facilitates: that anyone with an idea can reach the world. You talk to venture capitalists and they’re scared. They say a new start-up is just never going to be able to buy the speed that a Google or a Microsoft will be able to. Incumbent industries will be able to get their data to you quickly and new start-ups won’t have a chance. And as a result, you’ll have a drying up of the entrepreneurialism that’s happened on the Internet. And you’ll have a drying up of the Wikipedias, the nonprofit projects. Wikipedia works because it’s just as fast as Google. When Wikipedia starts to slow way down relative to Google, you’re more likely to just go to Google. So that’s a problem.
If you have the filter bubble and a non-neutral Internet, doesn’t it become even harder to find alternative points of view and for the dissident voice to be heard?
Yeah, and you know, I think this isn’t pessimism. This is realism. Tim Wu wrote a new book called “The Master Switch,” which talks about how every new medium in telecommunications history has had a period just like what we’ve seen with the Internet. There was democratization and openness, and people have dreamed these really big dreams — about the telegraph, about the telephone, about the fax machine. They dreamed it was going to connect us all together and transform everything, and that it could never be owned. Everybody has been saying the exact same thing about the Internet. This is like the eighth time we’ve been through this. The likelihood is that the Internet will be owned by a few large media companies. The question is, can we rally around this brief moment of incredible efflorescence of creativity and innovation, and say, “No, thank you very much, we want to keep it like this”? That’s the project of the next couple of years.
Have we learned any lessons along the way about what remedies and antidotes are actually effective?
We’re not learning. It’s like every time it happens people sort of think it’s totally different. The important thing to remember with the Internet is that there are large companies that have an interest in controlling how information flows in it. They’re very effective at lobbying Congress, and that pattern has locked down other communication media in the past. And it will happen again unless we do something about it.
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Previous interviews in this series:
Eliot Spitzer on the crisis of accountability (Oct. 1)
Lewis Lapham on the “end of capitalism” (Sept. 23)
Elizabeth Warren in her own words (Sept. 15)
Tim Wu 
House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio 
