A guest article by Alex Bugaeff
We hear the term “Net Neutrality” from time to time, but many avoid it as a technical area that they wouldn’t understand. It’s simple, really. It has to do with whether the internet will be controlled by government or left open to the forces of the marketplace.
Information flows through the increasingly busy internet “highway” system. Each new internet innovation, such as video gaming, streaming movies and huge blocks of statistical data, requires more and more of the “highway’s” capacity. That capacity becomes stressed from time to time.
Think of it as the Los Angeles interstate highway network – the more lanes they add, the more cars clog them up. Creating restricted lanes, like HOV lanes, does little good. The government transportation planners impose rule after rule to no avail and public transportation companies lobby to maximize their own interests, the driving public be damned.
Internet policy analysts have defined two sides to the internet control question that roughly correspond to the two sides in the LA traffic condition. On one side, analysts implement government regulation – the equivalent of transportation planners. On the other, they have grouped the existing major private sector players – mostly big internet service providers.
The private companies had been making the rules for the most part, until February, 2015. They engaged in practices such as “throttling” – the slowing of the streams of some sources of data in favor of other sources. Throttling can be compared to hot and cold water faucets with these big companies turning the handles to allow a greater or lesser flow from each, depending on which temperature is of greater benefit at the time.
Such private control of data through the internet has resulted in complaints from small players and government advocates. The small players complain that throttling and other such practices are unfair to those who have little marketplace clout. Government advocates complain that control of such a large and important segment of the economy by big business risks the government losing control.
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Prior to 2015, the internet was open and operating freely, albeit in a rough-and-tumble fashion at times. Then, after the Congressional election of 2014, the Obama Administration tried to take complete control. The President ordered the FCC to implement the regulations found in Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. Those regulations had been designed to reign in the monopoly that Bell Telephone had on landline phone circuits. Though outmoded, those regulations gave control of the internet to government.
The White House named this order “Net Neutrality” in an attempt to put a benevolent face on this takeover of internet operations. They claimed that the big companies were stifling innovation and that the regulations would impose a level playing field for the small service providers. The implementation of Title II had the effect of freezing in place the rules which benefitted the big companies and gave the FCC (and its Obama appointees) the power to enforce government regulations as a form of public utility.
In fact, the term “Net Neutrality” appears nowhere in the law or regulations and has no legal definition. It is a fiction designed to serve a larger purpose – government control of communications and internet commerce. So, the 3-2 vote of the FCC after Trump took office merely returned the internet to open and competitive business. Innovation is once again unfettered by government bureaucracy.
And, lest anyone suggest that the big service providers will dampen creativity, one need only look at the development of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to see how the entrepreneurial spirit thrives in the internet world despite the supposed entrenched corporate interests.
A Bachelor’s in Political Science and a Master’s in Public Administration both from the University of California, Berkeley, launched Mr. Bugaeff on a 40 year career in school and governmental consulting and teaching, during which he wrote and published over 100 manuscripts and technical manuals privately for his clients. Along the way, he continued the serious study of early American political history, concentrating on the original letters and writings of the Founders.
U.S. Commerce Dept. Photo