Rumors of the death of bipartisanship have been greatly exaggerated. Supreme Court and Federal Communications Commission rulings issued last fall have exempted broadband Internet service providers from a regulatory principle known as “network neutrality” that prevents people who own the physical underpinnings of communication systems (basically cable and telephone companies) from discriminating in terms of speed or availability of access to different Web content. Four House Democrats -- Ed Markey, Rich Boucher, Anna Eschoo, and Jay Inslee -- introduced legislative language that would reinstate network neutrality. The provision failed. Not, as is so often the case in the House, on a party-line vote, but with the support of only three other Democrats.
Advocates of the new, non-neutral regime say that strengthening the hands of infrastructure owners will be good for consumers. Right now, maximum connection speeds available to consumers are considerably slower than what's technologically possible. Faster Internet isn't available -- not because it can't be done, but because service providers have decided it's not worth spending the money involved in making it happen. Increase the potential for profits, the theory goes, and you'll increase the incentives to build better services.
Network-neutrality proponents point out that the current market for broadband services isn't very competitive. About half of all households only have one option. For the other half of households (like mine), the overwhelming trend is toward duopoly -- one phone company and one cable company. Perhaps in a world of robust competition, ending network neutrality would let 1,000 flowers bloom. Consumers who aren't interested in a wide-open Web might be able to get super-fast access to a restricted set of Verizon-approved sites at bargain basement prices (with Verizon's profits coming from licensing fees paid by companies to join the VerizonWeb) while those inclined to spend more could sign on with a neutral ISP offering connections faster than anything available today, to every site on the Web, for a somewhat higher fee. But that's not the world we have.
Instead, we run the risk that consumers will merely be locked into two unappealing choices. Maybe your cable company will sign a contract with Google, making them the exclusive search engine available to Comcast customers, while your phone company signs a similar contract with Yahoo. People who prefer one engine over the other will still have choice, but the “whichever one I want to use” option just won't be out there. Worse, the search engines themselves will face no competition. If some clever people devise a new, better search engine -- the next Google, the next whatever -- the risk is that nobody will ever be able to use it.
Worse, as Yochai Benkler points out in his excellent new book The Wealth of Networks, the end of neutrality threatens to shift the balance of power toward commercial enterprises and away from non-commercial ones who, so far, have been able to take advantage of radically lower costs of disseminating ideas and who aren't damaged by the ways the Web makes it harder to capture revenues.
A segmented, multi-tiered Internet threatens to reverse this, and return to an older, pre-Internet model where reaching a substantial audience requires substantial financial backing in order to be able to reach customers. That wouldn't be the end of the world for for-profit companies, but could put a major dent in enterprises that rely on hobbyists, donors, and volunteer labor to keep running.
Then again, I do think it's at least possible that switching to the new system will, in fact, spur the creation of the sort of more competitive dynamic that a non-neutral network would need to survive. Unlike many prominent liberal bloggers, I'm far from 100 percent certain that neutrality advocates have the better of the argument here. In some ways, however, this is just the point. The issue has been languishing in an obscurity all out of proportion to its objective importance. Most people have no idea what network neutrality is, and most of the ones who do know probably heard about it in the past two weeks. At a minimum, the status quo seems to work fine, while there are credible arguments that making the change would be a giant mistake. If this change really is a good idea, surely it could withstand some public scrutiny and debate. Instead, telecom companies seem determined to push it through under cover of night and, so far, Congress is happy to help.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
