The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission last week scored the biggest victory for the freedom of the Internet since Columbia law professor Tim Lu coined the phrase “net neutrality” in 2003.
Tom Wheeler’s proposal for the “strongest open Internet protections” in tech history represents a huge victory for consumers and Silicon Valley’s ecostructure, which requires an Internet with a level playing field for the thousands of entrepreneurs who are the valley’s most important asset.
The massive presence of companies such as Google and Apple, with their billions in resources, makes it easy to forget that it’s really the thousands of tech startups and small businesses that make the valley go. The region can’t expect its most creative minds to launch the next wave of tech innovation if we fail to nurture their basic needs.
The massive broadband providers such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are, of course, furious. They’re threatening lawsuits and a massive lobbying effort to protect their virtual monopolies. They had hoped to get richer by charging content providers such as Netflix higher prices for faster Internet speed and better reliability, leaving small players in the dust.
President Barack Obama obviously pushed the FCC chairman, whom he had appointed, to do the right thing and regulate consumer Internet service as a public utility. Wheeler originally took a position more favorable to broadband providers.
The president in November made a bold and somewhat unorthodox move by weighing in on an issue governed by a legally independent agency. Declaring that an open Internet “has been one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known,” Obama argued that “we must not allow Internet service providers to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”
The FCC proposal forbids broadband providers from blocking any website from consumers as long as its content is legal. It also bans providers from either slowing down or speeding up the content for websites, a crucial victory for content producers hoping to put their products before the widest audience of viewers.
One crucial but largely overlooked aspect of the proposal is the commitment to protect consumer privacy. Wheeler indicated the regulations would include assurances that the integrity and privacy of consumer data gathered by broadband companies would be maintained.
The full, five-member FCC is scheduled to vote on Wheeler’s proposal Feb. 26, and it’s likely to be approved along party lines, since there are two other Democrats on the commission. But it should not be politically divisive. A free, open, egalitarian Internet is in the interest not just of consumers but of the national economy.
