At its meeting on Thursday, the FCC is expected to finally — finally — take a big step toward making net neutrality the law of the land. In case you haven’t been following the issue, net neutrality is a really big deal. The term is used to describe the Internet system we more or less have now, a central principle of which is that all users have equal access to phone lines, and providers can’t give any users special treatment, even at a price. Network neutrality has been so fundamental to the success of the Internet, even former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who usually sided with big business interests, described it as one of the basic rules of “Internet freedom” and the reason the Web has nurtured so much technological creativity.
For the past three or four years, a mix of communications mega-corporations, largely led by AT&T, wanted to change the Internet to a “tiered access” system, in which Web site owners would have to pay extra for fast connections. It’s a policy that would turn what used to be called the information superhighway into a toll road, giving critical advantages to big-buck corporations.
If that happens, sites with a big bankroll (say, www.target.com) would get super-fast connections, while small-fry sites that couldn’t pay the toll would chug along at a sluggish pace. This is so obviously unfair, you wonder where the AT&Ts of the world get the nerve to propose it. As technology writer Annalee Newitz suggests, “It would be like letting an electricity company cut a deal with GE so that only GE appliances got good current.”
One of the best things about the Internet is its wide-open creativity, as well as the fact that Joe Citizen’s little Web site has the same access to phone lines as a behemoth like www.walmart.com. Over the past decade-plus, that egalitarian quality has allowed formerly small start-up sites such as Salon, YouTube, MySpace and hundreds of others to flourish and become part of our lives.
The new FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, strongly favors net neutrality, unlike his predecessor, Kevin Martin, of Charlotte. The Thursday FCC meeting will release a “notice of proposed rulemaking on open Internet access,” at which time the proposed regulations will go up for comment. Big communications corporations are still pitching a fit about the issue, but it looks as if years of activism by the likes of the Open Internet Coalition have paid off.
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2009.
need to do a little fact checking on your story. Sounds good but not accurate.
Powell, who got the job because of his Daddy Colin Powell, just gave a speech and did nothing on Internet neutrality. Kevin Martin of Charlotte actually adopted guidelines in 2005 and enforced net neutrality principles against Comcast for blocking Peer to Peer Applications
Genachowski is taking Martin’s principles and making them rules.
You already do have to pay for faster internet access. When I upgraded my system to highspeed I actually had to pay to have the cable run to my house – no stimulus money, not tax credits – we just saved until we could pay.
It is ridiculous to think that everyone needs the same amount of internet. My father-in-law doesn’t even HAVE internet and has no desire to get it.
I guess it just doesn’t make sense to put these kind of restrictions and requirements (that the FCC is proposing) on a system that is doing pretty good regulating itself.