How Wiping Out Net Neutrality Only Helps One Group: Big Telecom

The elimination of net neutrality makes it  harder for innovators and disrupters to offer new options to consumers. The costs of access will become so high that only the telecoms - all of which are now in the process of buying content providers - will be able to compete, cementing their hold over the market.

Since the public appears confused by the complexity of the issues involved, the question is at what point the politicians enabling this transformation will feel threatened enough by it to insist on changes. JL

Dante Ramos reports in the Boston Globe:

The broadband giants leveraged 20th-century cable and telephone monopolies into dominance over Internet service in the 21st. If nobody but your cable provider offers broadband on your street, you can’t just take your business elsewhere if the company slows down your favorite websites.

Remember when millions of protesters from coast to coast insisted that their broadband providers be allowed to favor Netflix over Hulu, or vice versa?

Wasn’t it stirring when all those laid-off factory workers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania rallied for “paid prioritization” — demanding that Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast be allowed to promote on-demand video services that they own, while slowing down traffic to would-be competitors or charging them for access to customers?

No, I don’t remember that either, because it never happened. Still, President Trump’s Federal Communications Commission wants to gut Net neutrality anyway, despite strong public sentiment that Internet service providers shouldn’t discriminate among content providers.

This fight, sadly, has become a textbook case of how industry groups exploit the public’s cynicism about the federal government for their own benefit.

After years of wrangling, a Democratic-led FCC voted in 2015 to require broadband providers to carry all data on equal terms, under the same rules that treat traditional phone service as a public utility to which everyone deserves fair access. Last week, at the behest of new FCC chairman Ajit Pai, the commission voted to begin reversing those Net-neutrality policies.Some rhetoric from supporters of the move was shameless.

“We rightly protest when governments around the world seek to place political controls over the Internet,” declared a set of talking points circulated by the GOP congressional leadership after the FCC vote, “and the same should apply here in the United States.” The talking points, according to The Intercept, were literally written by the cable industry. It’s a daring, if misleading, rhetorical stroke to implicitly liken Net-neutrality rules, which protect the free flow of information, to censorship in Iran or China.

Republicans and industry groups have spun the FCC’s recent concessions to big telecom firms as a shift to a more business-friendly stance. But being pro-business doesn’t have to mean giving big companies anything they ask for. In this case, the better approach is for Washington to set up rules that let competition flourish and give new ideas — the YouTubes of tomorrow — a chance to enter the marketplace without paying broadband companies first. But that means federal regulators sometimes have to play referee.

In Silicon Valley libertarian mythology, the tech world is forever in flux, and everything in it happens too quickly for any outside supervision. That seems ever less true, as the Big Five platforms — Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft — mature into a stable oligopoly and harden their grip over everything from advertising to retail to research on autonomous cars.

Still more entrenched are the broadband giants, who’ve leveraged 20th-century cable and telephone monopolies into dominance over Internet service in the 21st. If nobody but your cable provider offers broadband on your street, you can’t just take your business elsewhere if the company slows down your favorite websites.

Sure, laws grow outdated, and federal regulators make mistakes. But bureaucracies in corporate America can be every bit as obtuse, unaccountable, and stifling as in the public sector. Only the breakup of the Bell System in the 1980s allowed a far more dynamic communications market in the 1990s.

Now the trend is toward consolidation. Verizon bought Yahoo and AOL; AT&T is trying to buy Time Warner; Comcast owns NBC. Broadband companies are eager to grow by expanding into new markets — and by flexing their muscles over what content reaches consumers, and at what price. But what the typical consumer wants from a broadband provider is this, and nothing more: Keep the data flowing; charge me a fair, transparent price; and let me decide for myself what I see and what I read.