Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
The internet is getting a regulatory re-wiring.
In an historic 3-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission said it would change the way the nation’s internet service providers are regulated. For net neutrality advocates the vote is a major victory; for the nation’s internet service providers, a rebuke.
“The internet is the most powerful and pervasive platform on the planet,” said FCC Tom Wheeler during a public meeting ahead of the vote. “It’s simply too important to be left without rules and without a referee on the field.”
With the vote, the FCC is changing the way it views both wireless and fixed-line broadband service providers, reclassifying them as “Title II” common carriers under the nation’s telecommunications laws. The Title II designation, which already covers voice services, gives the FCC the ability to set rates, open up access to competitors, and generally more closely regulate the broadband industry. It’s a reversal of course for the FCC, which until now did not even enforce net neutrality rules on wireless broadband services, and very lightly regulated fixed providers. But it’s also a return to the regulatory regime that governed consumer internet services 20 years ago.
Internet service providers and Republican commissioners on the FCC see the new rules as unnecessary and dangerous government interference. “The internet is not broken,” said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. “There is no problem for the government to solve.”
Ironically, today’s vote was first set in motion by a series of lawsuits dating back several years, which challenged the FCC’s ability to enforce it’s own net neutrality regulations. Last year the latest legal challenge ended when a D.C. court ruled in Verizon’s favor, saying that the way that the FCC had classified internet services didn’t give it the right to enforce net neutrality.
A year ago, Chairman Wheeler said that the FCC could find a new way to enforce net neutrality without the Title II designation. But in November, the man who appointed wheeler, President Barack Obama, called for Title II. In retrospect, that made today’s vote inevitable.
Service providers are worried because, in theory at least, Title II now gives the FCC the authority to set rates in the cable industry, and to regulate the back-end of the internet—where service providers have recently begun charging content providers, such as Netflix, fees to host their content in their own data centers, a practice that is essential to smooth movie-streaming . The Commission has taken pains to say that it won’t regulate rates, but that it will ensure that nobody’s internet traffic is blocked or unfairly prioritized by service providers
No comments:
Post a Comment