The FCC Can’t Give You Net Neutrality

One provider prioritizes its own content, steering online users to its affiliated sites and services. It monitors practically every click you make online, tracking you as go from one website to the next. And it has a stranglehold on small digital businesses, leveraging a dominant role in the online ecosystem to require each and every small business to pay excessive fees if they want American consumers to find them.

Such fears prompted the Federal Communications Commission to take up net neutrality—the concept, as creator Tim Wu put it, of an “Internet that does not favor one application over another”—yet again last Thursday. How? By reinstituting Obama-era public-utility-style regulation to internet service providers. Generally, the rules would prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or deprioritizing lawful online content.

But here’s the thing: The company that prioritizes its own content, monitors your clicks, and charges excessive fees to small businesses isn’t an ISP that would have been subject to those rules, nor would it be subject to the rules the FCC is currently proposing. It’s Google—the search company that claimed to support net neutrality and repeatedly lobbied against its repeal.

National Security and Global Success Depend Upon Prioritizing Telecom Funding

With the government now funded into the new year, it’s time for Congress to take another look at its broader priorities, especially when it comes to the race with China for dominance in next-generation technologies. Whether it’s AI or cloud computing or virtual reality, if the United States is to remain competitive, we need to make secure and effective communications a priority. This means finally connecting all Americans to high-speed broadband and ensuring that our connectivity cannot be undermined by foreign adversaries.

Two popular programs are central to this goal: the Affordable Connectivity Program and the Rip-and-Replace program. Both of these programs have tremendous bipartisan, bicameral support; but both have been underfunded and now risk dying on the vine. Congress has the opportunity to fully fund these programs if it has the will to do so.

Congress Needs to Protect Kids, Not Big Tech

Social media is a threat to our children. A bipartisan Congress is now stepping up to make Big Tech products safe for our children; but the social media companies are putting their incredible lobbying power behind efforts to break the momentum.

Lawful Digital Discrimination Rules

The debates over the FCC’s digital discrimination rules continue to rage, and Joel has written to urge the Commission to review relevant Supreme Court precedent and take care to explain more fully how the FCC’s draft order comports with that precedent.

Digital Discrimination Rules

DPI has filed an ex parte with the FCC, arguing for targeted changes to its draft digital discrimination rules–an issue too important to risk needless litigation.

Net Neutrality Has a Section 230 Problem

Advocates argue that net neutrality rules—rules mandating that the internet not favor some pieces of content over others—are “essential to our democracy.” Color of Change, a progressive advocacy group, went so far as to say that net neutrality “has enabled [the internet] to serve Black people and other historically marginalized communities.” Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD, said “stripping away net neutrality is the latest attempt…to silence voices of already marginalized communities and render us invisible.”

Set aside for the moment the fact that all these claims were proven false five years ago after net neutrality rules were repealed. These same advocates are now cheering on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has once again decided to use its authority under Title II of the Communications Act to revive Obama-era net neutrality rules. The rules are intended to prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking, throttling, or deprioritizing websites.

But there’s a problem for the FCC—one the commission doesn’t seem to recognize. That problem is the infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.