On Net Neutrality and Duopolies

I haven’t spoken well on this subject; it’s a heated topic, in no small part due to Ajit Pai’s attempts to divide the subject along partisan lines. It would be easy to mistake what I have to say as support for Pai’s outright fabrications of the truth, but I want to make clear where I stand on this subject: none of the parties involved are trustworthy. Not the current FCC Chairman, not the American cartelized ISPs, and not the monopolistic software-as-a-service companies fighting from the other side. That said, I think it’s time to clarify my position and explain just why I’m against the idea of Net Neutrality — and in short, it’s because the FCC doesn’t enforce it.

I’m not arguing that it doesn’t work from a staunch libertarian position, I’ll readily admit; unfortunately, in a world of corporate giants, an opposing strength is needed. But even with the clarifications made in 2002, 2005, and 2010 by the FCC which created the original idea of Net Neutrality — a summarizing term describing the consumer’s right to: 1) access the lawful Internet content of their choice, 2) access services and run the applications of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement, 3) connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network, and 4) competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers (FCC Policy Statement, 5 Aug 2005) — Net Neutrality does not seem to address the larger problem that exists with regards to the Internet in the United States, and by its influence, the world at large: monopolistic and duopolistic dominance both in the private and public sectors. Perhaps the best reference I have found at this point is a video by one PSA Sitch on YouTube, The Net Neutrality Lie, which covers the entire history of internet legislation from 1996 to 2016, as well as the lawsuits in which the FCC has been forced to engage due to the severity of violations undertaken by the aforementioned giants of Internet Service Provision: Verizon, Comcast, AT&T. And yet, in all these cases, it seems like no one wants to bring up the one word that would matter: antitrust.

In 1974, the US Department of Justice initiated a divestiture lawsuit against AT&T, the sole provider of telephone service across the United States at the time; this lawsuit would span across 8 years and cover subjects including the purchasing of Bell Systems and Western Electric, the massive vertical integration of AT&T with these corporations as well as Yellow Pages, Bell Labs, NYNEX (now owned by Verizon), US West (owned by Qwest, which was in turn acquired by CenturyLink), and many others, and the severe anti-competitive nature of then-AT&T’s private- and public-sector market dominance. And despite the constant attempts to have the case dismissed by AT&T’s general counsel, in 1982 the Department of Justice was successful in dividing up the monopolistic system into what became known as the Regional Bell Operating Companies, and preventing the direct supply of equipment from AT&T’s subsidiary, Western Electric; and it was within 2 years that divestiture had created an enormous surge in competition between long-distance service providers within the market, with companies such as MCI and Sprint, as well as opening the market to the first experimental cellular-mobile technologies — however, the prices of local telephone services began to rise faster than the rate of inflation, despite long-distance prices falling amidst new competition. In addition, the break-up of AT&T impacted how national broadcast television companies distributed their programming to local affiliates; while these companies relied primarily on AT&T’s “long-line” infrastructure before the 80's, it began to be more and more financially-feasible to take up RCA and Western Union’s SATCOM and WESTAR satellite services to accomplish the same goal with the flexibility granted to these companies in a more competitive environment.

These days, we still see the remaining vestiges of the once nation-spanning Ma Bell, in companies like the modern AT&T, which had been acquired by Southwestern Bell (which rebranded itself as AT&T afterward), Verizon, and CenturyLink — both in utility provision as well as monopolistic tendency. However, they’re not the only ones. And while we might seem safe from a true market monopoly, ask any home-owner in the United States about their ISP options and they’ll tell you just about the same thing: “I only have two choices: Verizon or Satellite”, or “Time Warner or Satellite”, or “CenturyLink or Satellite”, and given the limitations of direct satellite home internet, it is to many consumers in the modern day a non-option in and of itself. This comes as the result of non-competition agreements between these enormous companies, who strike deals with one another as well as purchase out any competition within localities in order to maintain their control and dominance — creating in result a Ma Bell-like structure that holds near-monopolistic control over entire states and swaths of states. But they’re not the only ones. The protections put in place by the FCC in 2005, and reasserted in the Net Neutrality bill, cover not only Internet Service Providers but also Application and Content providers — companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, even Medium, the content provider which you’re reading this content on right now. And yet, much like the ISPs so heavily derided in the current debate, these companies engage in exactly the same anti-competitive practices with little or no oversight whatsoever, as well as being given the same public-sector luxuries of subsidization and greater access to government contracts.

Which brings me to my issue with Net Neutrality — it’s not entirely enforced in the first place, until consumers sling enough shit at the FCC to do something about it, as was done between 2008 and 2015 with regards to Verizon and Comcast. But it should not be a matter of consumers being manipulated, lied to, and even taken advantage of for years before the FCC takes action — the FCC’s responsibility is to assure the principles of Net Neutrality as laid out in the 2005 paper. And for the most part, they don’t.

Why? Because the people who work for the FCC, for the most part, have worked for those same companies from which they are supposed to be protecting consumers — Like our friend Ajit Pai, who served as Associate General Counsel for Verizon from 2001 to 2007. But at the end of the day, this isn’t a job for a corrupt Federal Communications Commission to handle. Much like the divestiture of AT&T in 1982, the problem is far too large for such a small and toothless sub-agency within the government to even begin addressing. It’s time for the Department of Justice to uphold the Sherman Antitrust Act, both in regards to duopolistic ISPs as well as monopolistic and duopolistic Application/Content providers.