Thursday, July 17, 2014

Net-neutrality comment period extended until Friday

After receiving nearly 700,000 comments about its net neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission has extended the comment period to midnight Friday. The original deadline had been Tuesday, but after receiving so many comments, including a flurry that crashed the website, the deadline was extended, and it appears "likely that net neutrality will become the most-commented-on issue in FCC history," Gautham Nagesh reports for The Wall Street Journal.

Among those keeping close watch on the rules are rural Americans. Net neutrality "could have unintended consequences here in the hinterlands, where customers are relatively few and far between and providing broadband services at all is still an issue in some localities," the McCook Daily Gazette warns. Some rural areas already lack high-speed Internet, or any service at all, but net-neutrality could slow things down even more, with companies like Netflix, which uses as much as 34 percent of Internet traffic at peak times, being blamed for slowing down networks.

"Net neutrality rules have been sold for a decade as a way to keep the Internet 'open and free' by keeping Internet service providers (ISPs), such as phone and cable companies, from blocking or degrading Web sites," former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell writes for The Washington Post. "Its advocates have argued that ISPs have an economic incentive to act anti-competitively toward consumers and competitors. In a common hypothetical they cite, ISPs would slow — or buffer — traffic for Netflix unless it unfairly pays for more access points, or “off ramps,” and better quality of service."

"In truth, however, market failures like these have never happened, and nothing is broken that needs fixing," McDowell writes. "If consumers were being harmed by ISPs, ample antitrust, competition and consumer protection laws already exist to fix the problem. And major broadband providers have pledged, in their terms of service, to keep the Net open and freedom-enhancing. Why?  Because it is good business to do so."

Columbia law professor Tim Wu testified before Congress that the goal of net-neutrality is to give the FCC oversight of the Internet, McDowell writes. "State manipulation of the Net would shape 'not merely economic policy, not merely competition policy, but also media policy, social policy' and 'oversight of the political process,' according to Wu’s testimony. Current regulations simply do not 'capture' the Net the way more government powers would through powerful new rules, he argued."

"Wu’s vision of more government 'capture' strongly resembles old broadcast regulations spurred by a 'scarcity' of outlets in the mid-20th century — the legal rationale for government regulation of speech over the airwaves, which would never be tolerated by, say, newspapers," McDowell writes. "Even in today’s competitive and digitized media markets, broadcasters must adhere to strict rules dictating speech, or risk losing their licenses. This Supreme Court-blessed government speech control operates under aliases such as 'regionalism' and 'localism' as invoked by Wu. These rules compel broadcasters to tailor their content to serve properly (in the eyes of regulators) their 'communities of license' That could include mandates ranging from sufficient local news, sports and weather, to a minimum amount of programming for children." (Read more)

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