Net Neutrality Is Coming Back. For Now.

Published on Apr 5, 2024

On Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024, the FCC announced that it would vote on a proposal to restore net neutrality rules on April 25th.

After an extremely long clownshow delay in confirming a fifth commissioner, the democrats finally have a majority again, and therefore the votes to pass such a proposal.

Net neutrality used to be a pet issue of mine. Back in my YouTube days, I made countless vlogs trying to explain the concept, and why people should support or care about it in the first place.

For those unaware, net neutrality is a very simple principle. In essence, it is the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Comcast and Verizon should not be allowed to prioritize any internet traffic above any other internet traffic.

The reason for this being the preservation of a level playing field, or competitive market, however you want to put it. Whether capitalism's almighty concept of fair competition ever truly exists under such a system is up for debate, but this isn't the place for that discussion.

For example, if Comcast started prioritizing network traffic to Netflix because of some deal the two struck, that would be against the principle of net neutrality. The idea being that now that Netflix is faster (or higher quality, or both), people are more likely to choose to watch things on Netflix rather than Hulu or some other upstart streaming service just trying to get off the ground. Comcast and Netflix would be stifling competition in the streaming market in this example.

It doesn't just have to be prioritization of traffic, either. There's another tactic that mobile carriers have been using for years called "zero-rating," in which they bundle some service for free with their mobile plan. Like if signing up for T-Mobile got you a free Spotify subscription.

This would either make customers of T-Mobile artificially more likely to use Spotify rather than a competitor like Apple Music or Tidal or whatever, OR make people who use Spotify more likely to switch to T-Mobile, not because Spotify or T-Mobile are functionally better than their competitors, but because they bought market priority through an exclusivity deal.

This becomes even more fraught in our increasingly vertically-integrated world, when a carrier prioritizes or zero-rates a service they own, like when, according to an FCC report, AT&T gave more favorable terms to DirectTV (which it owns) than to third-party services through its Sponsored Data program.

So net neutrality would outlaw all of that, it says that carriers, ISPs, the people providing the service, should not be allowed to use their position as carriers to influence a person's choice as to what they do with that service. It's a guiding principle for preserving the "neutrality" of Internet Service Providers in how and why people choose to access the sites and services they choose online.

It's more than that, too, because when the FCC talks about "restoring net neutrality," what they're actually talking about is reclassifying Internet Service Providers as "common carriers" under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which would allow the FCC to more strongly scrutinize and regulate them, they way they do radio and television networks, and telephone companies. Which is right and good because internet access should be treated like the utility that it is. But when people say "net neutrality," they're usually talking about the principle of literally preserving neutrality.

I thought this was a good principle to support ten years ago, and I still think so now! Regardless of the fact that the modern internet seems to have coalesced around a small number of toxic sites and apps that everyone seems to hate that they can't stop using, I still believe that the true spirit and backbone of the internet is the ability to seek out, find, and use anything and everything equally, and the ability to create something with an equal opportunity of being seen as anything else.

So why have I been avoiding the topic for the past seven years? Because the back and forth got fucking exhausting. Because a lot of other, arguably worse shit started and continues to happen. And because the Trump FCC exposed this whole debacle for what it is: a political see-saw that will continually shift directions toward whichever party controls the White House.

The Obama FCC under Tom Wheeler successfully voted to adopt net neutrality and Title II reclassification in 2015, and the Trump FCC under Ajit Pai almost immediately reversed that action in 2017, after a particularly and blatantly corrupt period of "public comment," during which ISPs submitted millions of fake comments against net neutrality, pretending to be real people. Pai was also just generally a shitheel company man with a check from Verizon where his soul should have been, who made a mockery of every issue he touched with clownish unseriousness.

And this is just so indicative of the entire Way Things Are, politically, in the US. Every couple of election cycles, the public finally gets sick of Republicans being literally evil, and they hand Democrats complete control of every branch of the government. And then the Democrats do absolutely nothing with it, except and until maybe the very last minute. Then they lose control of the government because, well, they didn't do anything of note for 4–8 years, and Republicans, deciding to, you know, wield the power they've been given (imagine!), immediately undo any good the Democrats did do at the very last minute when they remembered they were the government and oh no here comes another 8 years of literal pure evil.

So. Yeah. It's exhausting. Just like everything else. It's also been really disillusioning to watch the internet of the 2010s give way to the internet of the 2020s. This place sucks shit. Social media has stagnated into mostly the same handful of gigantic platforms full of algorithmically-delivered ads, SEO chum, and hate speech, all of which are owned by idiot billionaires or billion-dollar corporations. Journalism is withering and dying right in front of our eyes, and no one has any idea how to stop it. And every platform seems hell-bent on chasing AI fad money rather than doing anything useful or interesting. The web has never felt smaller or more bleak.

I'm just not sure if good old net neutrality is still enough to break the cycle of shit the internet has been spiralling down for the past ten years. Increased regulation would definitely be good, but will it stick? Or will we be right back at square one when Trump possibly (inevitably, if you ask me) wins back the presidency?

In this case, what we truly need is for congress to pass a permanent reclassification of ISPs as Title II common carriers, so we can stop having the same fight every 4–8 years, and finally move forward.

There has been good movement in many areas in the past few years. Lina Khan at the FTC has been gesturing at doing something about Big Tech for a while, and the DOJ just launched a hot new lawsuit against Apple for monopolizing the smartphone market. The FCC finally has its 3rd Democrat, even if it isn't the one we wanted, and so can move forward on things like net neutrality and explanding broadband access. A growing labor movement, and a more worker-friendly NLRB is reminding workers of all stripes that they're getting a raw deal and should do something about it.

But when all that work, and all that momentum, can be undone with the flick of a pen? And has been over and over again? It's hard to keep that same energy.

I will applaud the return of net neutrality at the federal level the same way I applauded its arrival in 2015. Who knows, maybe this time it'll stick. ISPs certainly aren't more popular than they were ten years ago.

I still think the good fight is always worth fighting, no matter what. It's just that sometimes… Fuck, man. Y'know?