FCC Chairman and former cable industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler has proposed new regulations for the Internet that would allow Internet Service Providers to charge more to site operators and content providers in order to get faster throughput to end users, and slow traffic to any sites and services that don’t pay up.
If these rules go through, it will break the current model of the Internet as an open, unfiltered platform for communication.
A federal appeals court today struck down some key provisions of the FCC Open Internet order. The court determined that, because ISPs do not have “common carrier” classification the way telephone providers do, the FCC does not have the authority to force ISPs to treat all traffic equally. This is a massive blow to the very foundation of what makes the Internet work the way it does, and has potentially devastating consequences.
Danny Hillis gave a TED talk in February discussing how the notion of trust is ingrained in the protocols that form the Internet, and why that leaves the Internet vulnerable. He says that because of the network’s trusting nature and the increasing number of critical services and systems that rely on the Internet, the network itself - not just the serivces using it - is fragile. His argument is that, in addition to putting greater effort into protecting the network, we need to develop a completely separate “plan B” in case the Internet were to crash.
Yesterday I received a reply to an email I’d sent to Sen. Ben Cardin that contained a link to my open letter on Net Neutrality. Here is what he said:
Dear Christiaan:
Thank you for contacting me in opposition to network neutrality.
Due to the widespread growth of Internet broadband use, the issue that Congress needs to consider is whether legislation is needed to regulate access to broadband networks and services.
The Net Neutrality debate seems to have reached critical mass, and it’s making me angry.
Google and Verizon have struck a deal to submit a proposal to lawmakers that, in short, would stand to kill the Internet as we know it. I’m not being dramatic or fear mongering, I’m stating the reality of the situation. The elements of this proposal are engineered to appear to protect users’ rights to open Internet, but in reality have major loopholes that seem to give them carte blanche to filter services at will on mobile networks & “new services” that show up.
