All right, I’m going to do this once. I’ll try to keep it
simple and not swear too much. If you try to respond to this with fear
mongering or hate, and not an educated, measured response, I will put you on
blast and this will devolve into the comment section on a Fox News article. No
one wants that.
I’m going to break this down into areas that are of the
biggest concern for people: broad regulation, content, distribution, and
legality of utilities. The main thing to remember is that all of this is intertwined
with over two centuries of legal history, political theory, and an evolving
nation. Most of the stuff I’m going to talk about is historical, but I will
bold the items that have a reference to modern times.
I think it is important to start with how the FCC is able to
do this. 200 years ago, when America’s GDP was the same as West Angola’s, the
railroads and telegraph came along. The infrastructure cost of developing these
(and future) technologies (television, telephones, internet to name a few) was
millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours. It was unreasonable for the
government to state that the companies, after investing all of that, could not
restrict who operated on those lines or telegraphs, so the companies (Union
Pacific Railroads, Western Union, etc.) were allowed to have a monopoly over
what ever they had created. The companies had every right to say that a rival
railroad could not operate on a rail line built by Union Pacific Just like Verizon has ever right not to
allow Comcast to operate on broadband lines that they (Verizon) built. But there was a catch: they could not restrict
individual’s access to those services; the services were considered essential
to basic rights (freedom of movement, freedom of speech, etc.) So the government
classified these industries (not the companies) as “utilities.” Just like the FCC has done now by
classifying the Internet, not Time Warner
or Comcast as a utility.
Lets talk about how the Internet works and why the companies
don’t want this. When you want to go somewhere on the Internet Time Warner or
who ever is your Internet provider (your ISP) creates a sort of road to that
web page. Some of these web pages (like Netflix and YouTube) take more of the
“road” to get there. The ISPs thought, “people should have to pay to get to or
to have the content of those high data pages” so they proposed the internet
“fast lane” or what ever you want to call it. What is the issue? Who cares, as
long as I can watch Jersey Shore or whatever? The issue is in order to have a
“fast lane” you must have a “slow lane.” Again, who cares? Well, how slow is
slow? At what point do you define “slow” as being 25mb/sec? 5mb/sec? 1kb/sec?
And how do you define fast? Same problem.
“I’ll just go to another provider” you say? Nah, you
probably won’t. Due to the complexity and cost of the infrastructure needed for
the Internet, most cities only have one provider.
How does that relate to the FCC, content, distribution, and
all that stuff? The FCC decision reclassifies Internet as Class II Common
Carrier similar to telephones, railroads, FedEx and UPS. It in no way affects
the content of the Internet, just the way it is distributed. People fear that
this will lead to the government controlling the content of the Internet, but
guess what? The government does not control the distribution of the Internet,
so it is inherently difficult (if not near impossible [child pornography and
the like are the exception]) to control the content. These laws and rules have
been around for hundreds of years (and challenged for hundreds of years), yet
we still have freedom of movement, freedom of association, and the like. I
would hope we would have moved past the sensationalistic attitudes of all of
this, but that was wishful thinking.
If it seems like I truncated this It’s because I got tired
and wanted a beer.
That is all.
