Politics/Technology

Net Neutrality Homework

Posted on by Tom

Net Neutrality is the hot topic of the day (so far–give it a few minutes, it will probably change).

Activists are telling us that we must act fast to save net neutrality. We are not told this specifically, but it’s strongly implied that our way of life and our immortal souls are in imminent danger! Call your congressman! Call the FCC! Call anyone, just do it now!

So obviously that’s the first alarm bell. “Act fast” usually means “act without thinking.” I set out to figure out what’s really going on.

What is Net Neutrality?

So what exactly is net neutrality?

There’s a lot of room for interpretation on this. If you’re a Democrat, net neutrality is the code word which means protecting consumers from predatory businesses who will raise the cost of the Internet. If you’re a Republican, net neutrality is the code word for unnecessary government regulation which stifles innovation from telecommunications businesses. Neither of those is exactly right, but Democrats and Republicans need to simplify things into “yes” and “no” buckets so they can rally the troops.

For a more technical definition, net neutrality is the loosely-defined principle that everyone should have equal access to Internet bandwidth (that “series of tubes”). Everyone from megacorporation Verizon all the way down to John Smith in his basement.

In practical terms, it means that if I were to create a search engine and put up a web page for it, billions of Internet users around the world should be able to access it in exactly the same way that they would reach and use Google’s search engine.

That’s what I think it means, at least. Wikipedia has an exhaustive page on the subject that muddies the waters considerably.

Currently, we enjoy a world full of net neutrality, and we have since the beginning of Internet time. In theory, at least. The reality is far from the ideal. Obviously I cannot realistically hope to reach even a fraction of the same number of eyeballs with my basement search engine as Google does with theirs, due to a vast array of insurmountable obstacles in my way.

The issue revolves around your Internet Service Provider, or the technology that allows you to talk to the Internet. If you are using a mobile phone, your ISP will be somebody like Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile (in the U.S.), and your data packets will fly wirelessly through the sky to a cell tower. If you’re using a desktop PC or laptop, your ISP will still be somebody like Verizon, AT&T, or some other cable television provider, but your data packets will most likely be skittering along a physical cable which is attached directly to your house, similar to a phone line. (Ah, things were so much simpler when we used dial-up modems.)

Unless you live in one of the multitudinous rural areas of America which shamefully still doesn’t have decent Internet access, but that’s another topic.

What’s In The News Today

Now that we’ve defined net neutrality without the partisan labels, let’s take a look at what prompted people’s ire today. The headline is: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released a statement declaring his intention to roll back Internet regulations imposed in 2015 during the Obama administration. Mr. Pai doesn’t say this, because it’s not appropriate political theater, but these are the so-called “net neutrality” regulations.

Well, that certainly sounds bad, if you liked the Obama administration and don’t like the Trump administration. Anything that Trump does to undo Obama’s work is automatically put into the “bad” bucket, if not the “authoritarian takeover” bucket, without much thought these days. (Not without some reason, I might add.)

But again, what does this press release actually mean? What was done in 2015, and what is being undone? I don’t know offhand. I certainly haven’t noticed a single change in my Internet connectivity before or since 2015. I thought I’d investigate.

First let’s get some facts out of the way. I am getting this information directly from the press release linked above, by the way, and not any of the spurious misinformative tweets flying around.

Nothing is happening on Thanksgiving Day. All those tweets saying that your government is trying to hide something by doing it on Thanksgiving when you’re busy making turkey are preposterous. I can’t even imagine any government employee working on Thanksgiving Day.

Furthermore, changes will not be made without a vote. The FCC will hold that vote on December 14th in an “Open Meeting.” So everyone jumping up and down about losing net neutrality this week is just plain wrong. (I don’t know what an Open Meeting is, but I can only assume there will be C-SPAN cameras present.)

Don’t get too excited about picketing the FCC and changing their minds, though: The vote is probably going to pass, or they wouldn’t have proposed the change in the first place.

What is happening this week is the release of the draft proposal Restoring Internet Freedom Order (catchy name), which is the plan for the new FCC regulation to be voted on December 14th. They are releasing it in an attempt at “transparency,” so we can all read it and scream about it before the meeting takes place. This is a slight dig at the Obama administration, which apparently did not release their net neutrality regulation plans prior to adopting it. I will take Mr. Pai’s word on this because I don’t remember, I don’t care to look it up, and it doesn’t really matter anyway, because they’re probably not going to change it no matter how much we scream.

At this point, we don’t know what the new rules will be. We are simply assuming that they are going to reverse the old rules. But we won’t know for sure until we pour over the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, whenever it’s released.

What Are The Current Regulations?

But before we can understand what the FCC is planning to reverse, we first need to know what the FCC did in 2015. There is a lengthy executive summary on this Obama-era White House archive page showing Obama’s long road to net neutrality. As you might expect from the source, it is replete with feel-good language, but very short on substance, so I had to look further. Here is a New York Times piece from March 12, 2015 which gives some additional context, though it is, again, very light on technical details about the regulations. (The article does confirm that the details were released after it was adopted, though.) One part stood out to me:

Lawsuits will not be filed until the rules are published in The Federal Register, which could take a week or more. The rules will take effect two months after they are published.

Whatever Obama did to “fix” the Internet, by my back-of-napkin calculations, it did not take effect until at least May 2015, some twenty-plus years after I first connected to the Internet. We can get even more precise. Here is a PDF of the extremely lengthy 2015 regulations, lifted from that New York Times article. I skimmed it to find out the effective date:

585. IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that this Report and Order on Remand, Declaratory Ruling, and Order SHALL BE effective 60 days after publication in the Federal Register…

The report shows up in the Federal Register on April 13, 2015, so Obama’s net neutrality regulations became effective on precisely June 12, 2015.

There were no sweeping net neutrality protections prior to that, beyond little bits here and there that I don’t care to research. The point is this: I did not notice any change in the Internet after June 2015 when these regulations took effect–good, bad, or indifferent.

Now you might think, “Well of course you didn’t notice, because they held up the implementation because of all the pending lawsuits.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it makes sense to me. According to that Obama White House page I linked above:

June 14, 2016: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia fully upheld the FCC’s net neutrality rules.

So we might reasonably conclude that Net Neutrality (with capital letters) was not achieved until June 14, 2016, a little over seventeen months ago (as of this writing).

Again, I don’t remember a single thing about my Internet changing in June 2016.

I’ve mentioned that a couple of times now to drive home the point that the panic-ridden discussions of net neutrality as an all-powerful force that controls our Internet destiny are simply not true. It’s more of a philosophical ideal than any practical, tangible thing.

Even if Obama’s rules were the best thing to happen to the world since sliced bread, we’ve only enjoyed them for seventeen months. Who even noticed they were there? Who’s going to notice if they’re gone?

Obama’s Internet Rules

For completeness, I wanted to document exactly what Obama’s Internet Rules are, as I’ll call them, so that everyone knows what they are up in arms to protect. They are included in that 300+ page PDF up there but yeah, I’m not reading that. The four points included on the Obama White House archive page are:

  • No blocking
  • No throttling
  • No paid prioritization
  • Increased transparency

Sounds great, but extremely vague and that’s just what Obama asked for, it’s not necessarily what is in that 300+ page PDF.

Dammit, I’m going to have to read that 300+ page PDF aren’t I? At least the executive summary. Here goes. The short version is that it is the same four key points from Obama’s request.

Paragraph 15. “No Blocking.”

A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.

Sure, I guess. Plenty of loopholes in there, though. What is “nonharmful?” What is “reasonable network management?” Plenty of wiggle room there to throttle or block torrent traffic, in other words.

Paragraph 16. “No Throttling.”

A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.

Same as above. Plenty of loopholes.

Paragraph 18. “No Paid Prioritization.”

A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not engage in paid prioritization.

This is the point that most people worry about when they march in the streets about net neutrality. Democrats worry that without this provision, the Internet will (among other things) become “tiered” so that rich people have a better Internet than poor people.

Paragraph 21. Doesn’t have a catchy name.

Any person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not unreasonably interfere with or unreasonably disadvantage (i) end users’ ability to select, access, and use broadband Internet access service or the lawful Internet content, applications, services, or devices of their choice, or (ii) edge providers’ ability to make lawful content, applications, services, or devices available to end users. Reasonable network management shall not be considered a violation of this rule.

I’m a little fuzzy on this one but I think it simply guarantees we can access whatever we want on whatever device we want. Subject to “reasonable” restrictions of course.

Paragraph 23. Transparency.

The one about transparency. This one is apparently unchanged since 2010.

So now we know. This is what we’re going to be watching for, to see how the new rules affect those old rules.

Keep in mind, if those four “open Internet” rules are reversed, it doesn’t mean we go back to the Wild, Wild West of Internet. There were rules prior to 2015.

Okay, enough. I can’t take all this government documentation anymore!

P. S. Can you imagine being the person who wrote a 300+ page meticulously-sourced and researched government document that is now getting thrown in the garbage can after only a couple of years?

Tom