Job-creating free-market capitalism has saved more people from poverty around the world than any system known to humanity. It relies on consumer choice to drive quality, features and cost to places our grandparents were not able to imagine in their lifetimes.
Unfortunately, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, along with a coterie of lobbyists, have misled good Republicans and proud fighters of excessive government regulation into believing that his effort to overturn net neutrality is about "deregulating" the Internet and releasing the pent-up creativity of your Internet service providers to create new products. They proffer that poor consumers might benefit from cheaper Internet plans, but only if your Internet service provider, or ISPs (Comcast, Verizon, etc.), could create bundles that included "fast lanes" for the content providers that have arranged kickbacks (errr, co-branded marketing dollars, peering agreements, exclusivity deals, etc.) to be in their fast lane.
What they (Pai and ISPs) are not saying is that other content providers (think Netflix if you're a Comcast subscriber) would be relegated to the "slow lane" unless they also pay extra. The other thing they don't tell you is that you already have a "fast lane." Consumers (you) choose every day what content you want and it is already in the fast lane because it's the only thing you're downloading. If you want Netflix after school for your kids and then download an HBO movie that evening, you decided what your priorities are. The phenomenal success of the Internet is predicated on you being able to access any content from anywhere on the Internet without a network provider middle man or government interfering with your browsing. This unregulated consumer choice has driven untold innovations that have made all our lives better.
Yes, we need to keep the Internet deregulated and free for competition by all Internet providers. I support removal of lots of regulations by the FCC on ISPs, but the core requirements of consumer choice and our far larger virtual (Internet) free market that rides on top of this network infrastructure requires the core concepts of net neutrality to remain in place.
Net neutrality rules prevent your ISP from tinkering with or blocking your data. Without the core net neutrality requirements, there is no limit to what your Internet provider could do to enhance their profitability. In theory, without net neutrality core rules your Internet provider could threaten to cut off ... err, wait, that is not theory, it happened before net neutrality rules went into place:
• AT&T: From 2007--2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls.
• Windstream: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, admitted to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream's own search portal and results.
• Verizon: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones. Verizon had asked Google to remove 11 free tethering applications from the Android marketplace. These applications allowed users to circumvent Verizon's $20 tethering fee and turn their smartphones into Wi-Fi hot spots.
• AT&T: In 2012, AT&T announced that it would disable the FaceTime video-calling app on its customers' iPhones unless they subscribed to a more expensive text-and-voice plan.
Chairman Pai says the disclosure requirements will allow consumers to "push back" if an ISP does something like this in the future. Unfortunately, when 58 percent of Americans only have zero or one choice in high-speed broadband, there will be insufficient market pressure to keep ISPs from all sorts of tactics to enhance revenue.
Paraphrasing James Carville in the Bill Clinton campaign, "It's the consumer, stupid."
Consumers decide the priority of how they want to use the Internet. net neutrality rules prevent ISPs from blocking or delaying your traffic. We don't need a middle man, neither the government nor ISPs, deciding who the winners and losers are; consumers decide that every day.
It's the consumers that must be the only ones to decide the priority of what they want to send or receive with the bandwidth they purchased. I encourage all free-market capitalist-minded citizens to support the core requirements of net neutrality so that the much larger virtual free market of the Internet can continue to thrive. Your vote for net neutrality is really a vote to deregulate the Internet from thousands of ISPs imposing thousands of creative regulations.
If we don't mess this up, who knows what innovations our grandkids will enjoy that I can't even imagine now?
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John Nabholz lives in Conway.
Editorial on 12/14/2017