[Updatte: In August 2024, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay on the implementation of these rules.]
[April 26, 2024] – The stars and planets may seem in their usual places this morning, but change came overnight, as Net Neutrality returned to America. If you blink you missed it, and it’s not guaranteed to stick.
Net Neutrality is again on the books, as the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted to restore rules requiring telecommunications companies to treat all apps and sites equally.
“It is incredibly important that there be ongoing oversight for the most important network of the 21st century. It’s that simple,” former FCC chief Tom Wheeler said on the Politico Tech podcast on the eve of that vote.
Voted in when Wheeler led the FCC during the Obama era, and then out during the Trump Administration, net neutrality is a technology hot potato in this partisan political climate. Like other Trump era edicts US President Joe Biden has reversed, this one will be challenged via litigation and legislation going forward.
But a return to the Internet as a regulated utility is important. That means no throttling, no superfast lanes, no favors for golf buddies. As the Three Stooges would say: “None of this and none of that.”
That look at blocking is a look back, and not the point today, Wheeler says.
“To define it in terms of no blocking and no throttling. I mean, that is so much yesterday’s issue. The broader question here is, will there be an ongoing expectation for all of the activities of this really important 21st century network? And will there be flexibility on the part of the FCC to deal with those?”
Wheeler’s caution comes as regulation of any kind is widely derided, even as Artificial Intelligence doomsaying predicts an internet more volatile than the often rocky network it is today.
Wheeler, a former cable industry executive who now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government outlines the issues in his “Techlash – Who makes the rules in the digital Gilded Age?” – a recent book that looks for guides in the history of communications.
The premise of the book is that it’s valuable to look to the 19th century Gilded Age as a clue to what’s going on now in communications.
In the 19th century there were great waves of industrialization as steam, trains and electricity gained traction, workers were exploited, farms gave way to cities, and Robber Barrons leveraged all.
Today, we all agree, there’s been great waves of technology changing the way we live, and how that is communicated. What we came to call mass communications – evolved out of the telegraph, the telephone, radio and television. These all took time to settle….
This is how Wheeler poses it in Techlash:
“While the economic model is still about maximizing revenue, it is no longer about the need for balance and veracity. Like the early ideological media, the new media profits by playing to users’ preferences and prejudices. The difference is that software algorithms organize the information to deliver what each user likes in order to hold the user’s attention to see as many revenue generating ads as possible.”
Technology companies make money “through the most sophisticated and secret content curation ever devised,” Wheeler writes. Let’s take this to include Big Data, algorithms, collaborative filtering, portals, recommendation engines, personalization engines and a parade of machine learning models.
With a next age of AI bubbling in a slew of Large Language Models, that secret curation model has already remade media and society. Having an FCC that works for a neutral network is important as that next age looms. – J Vaughan