The ISPs Strike Back
The dark side of the fight for net neutrality
In general, I’m not a big fan of Star Wars analogies. But it’s pretty much impossible to miss the parallels when it comes to the Trump-era Federal Communications Commission and its escalating war against net neutrality.
The players are familiar. The smirking emperor resides in the White House rather than an imperial palace, and our unrepentant Darth Vader analogue — always eager to do his master’s evil bidding — heads up the FCC rather than overseeing white-helmeted stormtroopers.
But we know this plot all too well, and we’re quite firmly in the midst of The Empire Strikes Back territory.
Much as the Star Wars Republic rose and fell, the rise of — and attacks on — net neutrality closely track the shifting priorities of the greediest longtime players in the USA telecommunications pantheon: that is, the dominant ISPs.
It may seem difficult to fully comprehend today, but in the early days of the Internet’s ancestor ARPANET, starting back in 1969 or so, telecom giants like AT&T at least officially professed little to no interest in packet switching networks — certainly not ones that were invented by anyone but themselves. Even obtaining the leased data lines for ARPANET (we’re talking backbone speeds under 56 Kb/s, using modems the approximate size of refrigerators) could be a struggle.
This is not to suggest that there was no commercial interest in computer networks during this period. But the prevalent model was focused on the sort of “usage sensitive” pricing (e.g., pay per minute connected, pay for the amount of data sent or received) that fit into the long distance telephone call paradigm of the era.
In retrospect, the fact that the ARPANET (and later, Internet) “flat rate” model (user charges not based on the amount of time you were online nor for most ordinary subscribers the amount of data that you used) was the result both of deliberate planning and a series unpredictable events — the latter of which could easily have led us all down a very different and much darker path in alternate scenarios.
Even such foundational mainstays as TCP/IP were not necessarily givens. At one point the U.S. government actually mandated that TCP/IP would be essentially replaced with the entirely different (and as far as most of us were concerned back then, inferior and far more complicated) OSI — Open Systems Interconnection — protocol model. Luckily, the OSI project (for all practical purposes in this context) stalled out, and TCP/IP roared ahead.
And with the continuing rise of TCP/IP came a parallel beauty, the kind of evenhanded treatment of network users that we would many years later call “network neutrality.” The network treated everyone essentially equally. It didn’t play favorites. As far as network connectivity was concerned, small players had as much of a shot at success as the giant telecom firms who once again increasingly controlled traditional telephone services, cable TV services, and the spectrum of technologies including copper, fiber optics, and wireless.
In the kind of “We pick the winners!” world that big telecom had envisioned, many of the major Web players we know today would likely never have had the resources to even really get started.
Inevitably, the dominant telecom firms — emboldened and ever more empowered by weak state telecom regulations and liberal merger rules — eventually took real notice of the Internet, as some of us in the early days had feared they’d ultimately do.
Their subsequent moves to “take back control” of the Internet have been straight out of their standard telecom playbooks reaching back to the dawn of telephony. Scheme and collude to avoid serious competition. Impose unjustifiable bandwidth caps and usage penalties. Promise communities high-speed broadband deployments that never materialize. And so on.
But this was never enough for these dominant ISPs. For years, they’ve awaited a time when they could fundamentally alter the most basic tenets of the Internet, in the hopes of a return to the “good old days” when they were the only game in town, with nobody even attempting to really regulate their now utterly essential and often effectively monopolistic Internet access services.
With the coming of the Trump FCC and its new chairman Ajit Pai, these ISPs now see their opportunity in full flower.
There’s an old saying that “the fish rots from the head down” — and it’s difficult to picture a more vivid example of that maxim than the Trump FCC (or for that matter, the entire Trump administration) in action.
Pai’s Darth Vader impression in service of his master Trump is letter perfect. Stonewalling. Lies. Obfuscations. Misdirections. All that’s missing is the loud breathing sound effects — and sadly, there seems far less chance of actual redemption for Pai than for the character from the films.
Protests against Pai regarding net neutrality are almost certainly a lost cause for now. They may make protesters feel better, but they’re probably about as useful as trusting his vile, lying emperor in the Oval Office.
Pai himself proclaims that we should trust the dominant ISPs to not take advantage of the situation. That’s laughable of course — these firms have been lying to communities and subscribers for decades. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
So is the net neutrality cause lost? No, it is not.
After Pai’s moves to dismantle net neutrality, these complex issues will move back to the courts in what is likely to be anything but a quick process.
And in the meantime, it’s important to remember that the dominant ISPs — for all of their power — are still quite sensitive to bad publicity. Let’s see a show of hands of everyone who thinks that their dominant ISP isn’t charging enough or doesn’t already have too much control over their Internet usage! They know that U.S. consumer surveys routinely rate them among the most hated and mistrusted firms in the country.
Every time that one of these ISPs even begins to make anti-neutrality, anti-consumer moves, they must be immediately lambasted — broadly and publicly. They must be tied in the public mind directly to Ajit Pai and Donald Trump, and excoriated in a manner to make their shareholders sit up and take notice in fear.
Pai and these firms hope that they’ll be able to gradually game the system by slipping in ever more significant anti-neutrality actions. The odds are that they’ll start relatively small and then escalate from there, hoping to stay “under the radar” for as long as possible.
This must not be permitted. Their feet must be held to the fire firmly and immediately, no matter how small the initially perceived transgressions.
In my experience, the customers of these firms intuitively realize that these companies do not have their subscribers’ best interests at heart in these anti-neutrality moves and alliances with the Trump FCC. I am finding this to be the case largely irrespective of those subscribers’ political leanings on other issues.
If we keep our eyes on the ball — and avoid wasting our energies in unproductive avenues — we can come through this just fine in the longer run, irrespective of how dark the situation looks right now — just like in the movies.
