It’s probably not going to be like they say.
They are probably not going to charge you much more for Netflix or Hulu or Amazon. You might not notice any difference at all in the way you consume media.
Net Neutrality is important for content makers, not content consumers.
Content makers like, the Resistance.
There are people arguing right now that the only thing that will change about your experience consuming content online is that your ISPs will be allowed to track and maintain records of all your choices and preferences and might share them in unexpected ways with your mother.
We have all gotten used to existing in spaces online. We use portals like Facebook and Twitter to talk to friends and share interesting news and stories. For over a decade that battle was fought and most of us weren’t paying much attention. I wrote this in 2008:
“That’s why I was at Stanford last week for the FCC hearing on Net Neutrality, even though I had a display to make about how much oil a plastic bottle uses. I’m using the internet for that too, of course.
I found the time to come and defend it, because it’s worth saving. We must decide what it is our culture values, and whether security and commerce can conspire to trump liberty. We must decide whether a man really should be free to associate, publish and believe as he wishes, because he is free to access a wealth of information. Or whether a few men, unseen, should dictate what kinds of conversations occur in the future. There were some incredible minds on the panel. I’m already familiar with Lawrence Lessig, but I was really impressed with Robb Topolski. He was the one who started this when he discovered Comcast blocking his files. He was sharing his hobby, barbershop quartet files, which were in the public domain and perfectly legal to share, and was intelligent enough to discover what his ISP was doing.
And I’m not. I’m not educated enough. I would have given up and thought the site was down. That’s what’s so creepy about this whole thing. I’m starting to distrust more of the market than I really care to. Another person on the panel testified that in 300 attempts to upload and share the Bible, 276 of them failed for exactly this reason. The people invisibly providing me content are similarly invisibly yanking it without my knowledge, as often as 9 out of 10 times. Even worse, at the first FCC hearing, they paid at least a few people to fill up the hall so the public couldn’t attend. This was the second hearing, and Comcast didn’t even deign to show up. There’s some real evidence accumulating that some of these people don’t really care for their customers and their rights so much.”
And here we are, 10 years later. This is Topolski’s testimony from that day:
Please note that this video has fewer than 5,000 views. This is a real human being, talking about how a corporation actually interfered with his speech rights on a network that exists because the federal government built and maintained it. He used science to collect evidence about their behavior and to demonstrate a pattern of lying to consumers. He makes an impassioned case for all the businesses and users who are harmed by this service that promises one thing and refuses to deliver it because it knows most of us lack the knowledge and skills to run this kind of experiment as users.
That is why we have Net Neutrality. Because the most vigilant and knowledgable users did the work of documenting malfeasance and they went to the government to exercise their First Amendment right: petition for redress of grievances. And we who have benefited from that work, with this expectation that our digital archives and networks will just work reliably without mysterious slowdowns and failures ARE GOING TO DROP THIS BALL BECAUSE ONLY 2% OF US EVEN KNOW WHAT “TCP RESETS” OR “DEEP PACKET INSPECTION” ARE.
The reason I am not climbing up on my roof to paint “SAVE NET NEUTRALITY” on my roof for passing planes is because I am at a loss today. This battle was won. We had Net Neutrality. We actually got the FCC and the Obama Administration to hear us in 2015.
I know what that means, because I couldn’t even get MoveOn to send MoveOn members to the next FCC hearing at Stanford in 2010 when they were soliciting for events with this description:
“Stand for Democracy events are strategic local actions that will help build the movement to end corporate power and take back our democracy.”
But I went. There is almost no mainstream coverage of that hearing at all, but I did find this article featuring the sign I made that day:
So here’s the thing: We already have evidence that our ISPs are apt to mess with their customer’s content in ways that are borderline illegal, definitely unethical. We have years and years worth of evidence. I don’t know why this doesn’t bother more people.
I have been involved in activism for Net Neutrality for over a decade because I predicted the media ecology we are seeing today. For a few brief years, it looked as though we might actually manage to maintain access to a system that has always been mostly taxpayer funded, subsidized and maintained. But over time, we are seeing that this is not true. As the media has consolidated we see a huge public arena dominated by fewer and fewer voices. It’s like these social media spaces are just going to function as portals to content from a handful of major players, instead of a thriving and robust conversation with many voices shared in a common and easy to access arena.
That’s how they are designed to function because that is the most efficient way to monetize social media.
This is the pattern I was attempting to articulate when I wrote about CNN the other day. They dominate every space because their name is recognized and prioritized over other content. They reinforce that dominance with marketing designed to cement their position in the press hierarchy. And they are fundamentally beholden to powerful entities in a way that neuters them as any kind of check on presidential (or any kind really) power.
That is why they also benefit from things that Net Neutrality bans. When they begin tailoring packages for consumers they will gain greater insight into our media consumption patterns. This is a gold mine for places like Facebook and Google because that data allows them to monetize more aspects of our web use.
Why should we prioritize users over the social media titans who built the spaces we inhabit?
My answer is that I only say things that I actually believe.* That is why Net Neutrality is so important. We have already set up a media ecology where the national conversation is dominated by paid speakers. Paid speakers are fundamentally untrustworthy, and their access to podiums and audiences relies on their ability to adhere to social norms. They are punished and banished from the largest stages when they make challenging speech. As Kathy Griffin was.
We are building a world where we are not going to be free to discuss politics or anything, really. Our jobs are how we create our identities, afford to live and eat and unfortunately they’re also how we get medical care. When a woman on a bike gave Trump’s motorcade the finger, she didn’t document that. She just did it. And the Getty photographer paid to travel with Trump took that picture. And Facebook and CNN and NYT all talked about it and shared it millions of times for lots of money while she lost her job. Her statement was monetized by all the entities who have no First Amendment rights. And if you want to exercise your rights, you had better not have a job someone could threaten.
We have the opportunity now to actually talk to other citizens about the things we believe and the expectations we have for the country. We can still turn this around, I think. But it will be work and most of us don’t think about fighting for any of the privileges we now enjoy. It is such a fragile and profound moment in human history. It was never this easy to reach out to other human beings and ask them if they see the same things you do.
That is empowering.
We’re losing that. Maybe it needs a sexier name than Net Neutrality, but we’re kind of out of time for marketing studies. But I am sure I don’t want to tell my children about this moment in time where we decided not to preserve the greatest commons ever created on Earth, because we didn’t have a snappy enough slogan for it.
*evidently I really believe in reverse psychology and clickbait headlines, just like every other quasi-sentient web entity ❤
