[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 198 (Tuesday, December 5, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7840-S7841]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NET NEUTRALITY
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, next week, the Federal Communications
Commission, FCC, will consider a proposed rule, that, if approved, will
end net neutrality as we know it and will threaten the foundation of a
free and open internet. Net neutrality is the simple proposition that
internet service providers should treat all internet traffic the same;
they should not be able to exploit their power to charge for preferred
treatment, allowing big corporations to dominate the internet.
The Chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, wants the FCC to undo its
protections for net neutrality. His proposed ruling is perversely
styled as ``Restoring Internet Freedom,'' when in fact it would do the
opposite. It would allow internet service providers to decide which
websites will be privileged and which will be throttled or even
blocked. Make no mistake: This will mean that the big firms that can
afford the ``fast lane'' will be protected, while harming consumers,
startups, and potentially even freedom of speech online.
Alarmingly, Chairman Pai has decided to ignore millions of comments
submitted by individuals across the country, citing concerns that they
are not ``unique.'' As a Member of Congress accountable to my
constituents, this is a particularly offensive posture. Unique or not,
comments and concerns submitted to my office by Vermonters are treated
with the same weight and value as any other. Until the FCC fully and
meaningfully considers the more than 21.7 million comments it has
received about this proposed rule, it should not proceed with this
vote.
A recent New York Times article by Farhad Manjoo, entitled, ``The
Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death,'' lays
out clearly why the FCC's proposed repeal of net neutrality will bring
the open internet one giant leap closer to becoming a corporate
playground. If, as expected, Chairman Pai jams through his proposed
rule change next week, it will be clear that he has done so to the
benefit of a few deep-pocketed corporations and to the detriment of
everyone else who relies on the internet to support commerce,
communication, and community. I ask unanimous consent that the article
by Mr. Manjoo be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Nov. 29, 2017]
The Internet Is Dying, Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death
(By Farhad Manjoo)
Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up
Facebook on your phone and you will still see your second
cousin's baby pictures. But that isn't really the internet.
It's not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s
and early 2000s, the product of technologies created over
decades through government funding and academic research, the
network that helped undo Microsoft's stranglehold on the tech
business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook
and Netflix.
Nope, that freewheeling internet has been dying a slow
death--and a vote next month by the Federal Communications
Commission to undo net neutrality would be the final pillow
in its face.
Net neutrality is intended to prevent companies that
provide internet service from offering preferential treatment
to certain content over their lines. The rules prevent, for
instance, AT&T from charging a fee to companies that want to
stream high-definition videos to people.
Because net neutrality shelters start-ups--which can't
easily pay for fast-line access--from internet giants that
can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against
the complete corporate takeover of much of online life. When
the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look
like and feel like something else altogether--a network in
which business development deals, rather than innovation,
determine what you experience, a network that feels much more
like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you
Napster and Netflix.
If this sounds alarmist, consider that the state of digital
competition is already pretty sorry. As I've argued
regularly, much of the tech industry is at risk of getting
swallowed by giants. Today's internet is lousy with
gatekeepers, tollbooths and monopolists.
The five most valuable American companies--Amazon, Apple,
Facebook, Google and Microsoft--control much of the online
infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud
storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of
broadband companies--AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many
of which are also aiming to become content companies, because
why not--provide virtually all the internet connections to
American homes and smartphones.
Together these giants have carved the internet into a
historically profitable system of fiefs. They have turned a
network whose very promise was endless innovation into one
stuck in mud, where every start-up is at the tender mercy of
some of the largest corporations on the planet.
Many companies feel this shift. In a letter to Ajit Pai,
the F.C.C. chairman, who drafted the net neutrality repeal
order, more than 200 start-ups argued this week that the
order ``would put small and medium-sized businesses at a
disadvantage and prevent innovative new ones from even
getting off the ground.'' This, they said, was ``the opposite
of the open market, with a few powerful cable and phone
companies picking winners and losers instead of consumers.''
This was not the way the internet was supposed to go. At
its deepest technical level, the Internet was designed to
avoid the central points of control that now command it. The
technical scheme arose from an even deeper philosophy. The
designers of the internet understood that communications
networks gain new powers through their end nodes--that is,
through the new devices and services that plug into the
network, rather than the computers that manage traffic on the
network. This is known as the ``end-to-end'' principle of
network design, and it basically explains why the internet
led to so many more innovations than the centralized
networks that came before it, such as the old telephone
network.
The internet's singular power, in its early gold-rush days,
was its flexibility. People could imagine a dazzling array of
new uses for the network, and as quick as that, they could
build and deploy them--a site that sold you books, a site
that cataloged the world's information, an application that
let you ``borrow'' other people's music, a social network
that could connect you to anyone.
You didn't need permission for any of this stuff; some of
these innovations ruined traditional industries, some
fundamentally altered society, and many were legally dubious.
But the internet meant you could just put it up, and if it
worked, the rest of the world would quickly adopt it.
But if flexibility was the early internet's promise, it was
soon imperiled. In 2003, Tim Wu, a law professor now at
Columbia Law School (he's also a contributor to The New York
Times), saw signs of impending corporate control over the
growing internet. Broadband companies that were investing
great sums to roll out faster and faster internet service to
Americans were becoming wary of running an anything-goes
network.
Some of the new uses of the internet threatened their
bottom line. People were using online services as an
alternative to paying for cable TV or long-distance phone
service. They were connecting devices like Wi-Fi routers,
which allowed them to share their connections with multiple
devices. At the time, there were persistent reports of
broadband companies seeking to block or otherwise frustrate
these new services; in a few years, some broadband providers
would begin blocking new services outright.
To Mr. Wu, the broadband monopolies looked like a threat to
the end-to-end idea that had powered the internet. In a legal
journal, he outlined an idea for regulation to preserve the
internet's equal-opportunity design--and hence was born ``net
neutrality.''
Though it has been through a barrage of legal challenges
and resurrections, some form of net neutrality has been the
governing regime on the internet since 2005. The new F.C.C.
order would undo the idea completely; companies would be
allowed to block
[[Page S7841]]
or demand payment for certain traffic as they liked, as long
as they disclosed the arrangements.
At the moment, broadband companies are promising not to act
unfairly, and they argue that undoing the rules would give
them further incentive to invest in their broadband capacity,
ultimately improving the internet.
Brian Hart. an F.C.C. spokesman, said broadband companies
would still be covered by antitrust laws and other rules
meant to prevent anticompetitive behavior. He noted that Mr.
Pai's proposals would simply return the network to an
earlier, pre-network-neutrality regulatory era.
``The internet flourished under this framework before, and
it will again,'' he said.
Broadband companies are taking a similar line. When I
pointed out to a Comcast spokeswoman that the company's
promises were only voluntary--that nothing will prevent
Comcast from one day creating special tiers of internet
service with bundled content, much like the way it now sells
cable TV she suggested I was jumping the gun.
After all, people have been predicting the end of the
internet for years. In 2003, Michael Copps, a Democratically
appointed commissioner on the F.C.C. who was alarmed by the
central choke points then taking command of the internet,
argued that ``we could be witnessing the beginning of the end
of the internet as we know it.''
It's been a recurrent theme among worriers ever since. In
2014, the last time it looked like net neutrality would get
gutted, Nilay Patel, editor of the Verge, declared the
internet dead (he used another word for ``dead''). And he did
it again this year, anticipating Mr. Pai's proposal.
But look, you might say: Despite the hand-wringing, the
internet has kept on trucking. Start-ups are still getting
funded and going public. Crazy new things still sometimes get
invented and defy all expectations; Bitcoin, which is as Wild
West as they come, just hit $10,000 on some exchanges.
Well, O.K. But a vibrant network doesn't die all at once.
It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but
imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital
world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole
thing as normal.
It's not normal. It wasn't always this way. The internet
doesn't have to be a corporate playground. That's just the
path we've chosen.
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