After many years of fighting against entrenched corporate interests, the FCC finally extended its regulatory authority to the internet, instituting the so-called "net neutrality" rule in 2015. Finally, the internet would remain free and open.
Then a new administration came in, with new leadership at the FCC. There was a move to repeal the common-sense principle of "net neutrality!" Why would anyone think that letting giant corporations pick and choose what we can see on the internet was a good idea, making things they didn't like too expensive or simply blocked — crazy! It's kind of like repealing the laws against murder, hoping that people would just not do it!
Some leading Democrats made it clear what would happen if net neutrality were repealed:
The senate was being careful here — what about ISP's blocking access to sites they don't want you to see? Senate leaders were outspoken about the danger:
People were upset. There were demonstrations at more than 700 Verizon stores nationwide:
Protestors even spread out through the new FCC chairman's neighborhood, demonstrated in front of his house, took pictures of the inside of his house through his windows, and made it clear that this man, Ajit Pai, was leading the movement to destroy the internet as we know it.
After a vote near the end of 2017 to repeal this important protection, the repeal finally took effect in June 2018, about a year ago. That's when the disaster of corporate control of the internet, access limitations, slower speeds and no more innovation started. Articles were written in the NY Times and elsewhere spelling out what would happen: "repealing these onerous rules “would be the final pillow in (the internet’s) face” (The New York Times), would cause “erosion of the biggest free-speech platform the world has ever known” (ACLU), and would be “end of the internet as we know it” (CNN)."
It's now about a year into the disaster. I started looking into just how bad it's been and was struck by how hard it is to find the news stories about all the sites that have been blocked, all the students relegated to slow lanes and prevented from watching their favorite video streams, and all the price hikes. Have the giant corporations really been so scarily effective at suppressing the consequences of their self-serving actions?
I dug in and found this:
Last year, average internet download speeds shot up almost 36%, and upload speeds climbed 22%, according to internet speed-test company Ookla in its latest U.S. broadband report.
There are more users than ever. More videos to watch. More content to consume. More commerce being conducted. No sites are being blocked. No one is complaining that their service is being throttled. And more people are gaining access to broadband.
During President Trump’s first year in office, in fact, the number of people without access to a broadband connection dropped by 18%.
Meanwhile, the 5G era approaches, which will increase speeds — for mobile and fixed broadband — exponentially while injecting more competition among providers. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has started launching mini-satellites for his Starlink initiative, which will provide broadband internet to subscribers wherever they are on the planet.
Oops. Maybe the disaster isn't a disaster at all. Maybe it's even a good thing, hard as that may be to understand. Here's what I wrote about it when repealing net neutrality was being discussed, and here's the long post I wrote on the subject when the campaign to institute net neutrality was underway.
p.s. That earlier post on net neutrality touched a few nerves. A few programmers at companies I worked with got all hot and bothered, and refused to interact with someone so completely unethical that they could harbor such awful thoughts. Well, now we know how it all turned out, and what the repeal-net-neutrality disaster amounted to…