Net Neutrality - Is it really neutral?

Madison was on the final leg of her business trip to Kuala Lumpur. She had flown the LAX-DCA route many times since she took her job with Cisco. Fortunately, all of those Business Class flights had allowed her to rack up enough frequent flyer points to upgrade to First Class for her latest run to the Far East.

As she reclined waaaaay back in her “passenger pod” on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, her mind drifted away from the feature movie she was watching on the seat monitor, to her departure from her flat in the leafy Adams-Morgan section of Washington DC. She had summoned her Uber ride from the app on her iPhone. She is a Verizon Wireless customer and loves the ubiquitous 4G data coverage in the DC metropolitan area, even when she is riding underground on the Metro. Her data plan is big enough that she really doesn’t worry about going over the monthly limit, even if she does stream quite a few movies and series episodes during her commute and her downtime.

On the way to the airport, the driver hopped onto the Express Lane with his E-ZPass Flex, since Madison was running a little late. It was worth paying the few extra bucks to not be sprinting for the gate.

When she arrived, she headed to the special check-in line to drop off her luggage. Being a frequent flyer has its benefits and her Gold status is one she treasures. She usually has just a carry-on rollerbag but since she will be out of country for a week, she had to pack a suitcase.

After she left check-in, she headed for TSA security. She has a TSA Precheck ID, so she can zip right through security without removing her jacket, shoes and her laptop from her bag. “Wow”, she thought, “that was the best $85 I ever spent, signing up for my KTA number. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.”

Through security, she headed straight for the airline’s Ambassador Club lounge. She had a few minutes to relax and sip a cup of coffee from the concierge desk.

Her daydream was interrupted by an announcement from the flight crew that they would be beginning their decent into Dulles in 10 minutes. She turned on her iPhone to check the latest happenings. The free Wi-Fi onboard allowed her to have seamless internet everywhere she flew. A push notification from her Washington Post feed came up announcing that the FCC has voted to rescind the Net Neutrality rules adopted in 2015 by the then Democrat-led FCC Commissioners.

“What is this?”, she thought. “The new Commissioners are all about the rich and the powerful. They will do anything to take away my ability to have free and simple internet without any strings attached. The nerve of them to expect people to pay extra for something they want and to allow the big corporations to pull one over on helpless consumers!”

She immediately jumped onto the change.org website to sign the petition to reinstate the rule, never once sensing the extreme irony in her disgust with the system.

Which argument about Net Neutrality is on the side of the angels? I really don’t know, but I do know this – if the debate is about fairness, Net Neutrality would be the only thing in the modern American experience which is fair.

Folks, nothing is fair. As I tried to illustrate in my fictional story above, there are better restaurants, better cars, better seats on planes, better lawn mowers, better coffee, better wine, better cable TV, better cigarettes, better health care, better online movies, better roads, better neighborhoods, even better “friends” if you are willing to spend more for them. And for the rare, few things that are the same for everyone – water, electricity, gasoline – you pay more if you use more.

Until 2015 when the current Net Neutrality rules were set up, the internet had been probably the most fair thing in existence. You could use as much of it as you wanted if you subscribed to a wired service such as cable, fiber or DSL. You paid extra for how fast the internet was delivered to you but there was really no limit on consumption. Sure, there were a few scoundrels who wanted to “shape” your internet experience. Some providers wanted to restrict your access to sites which competed with what they were selling you (think cable providers which provide content, such as Comcast or Time Warner) but in most cases it was free and open access.

When the Obama administration went as far as reclassifying the internet as a public utility so that they could write a rule through a regulatory agency which allowed them to codify “neutrality”, I knew something was fishy. No one ever goes to this amount of effort and controversy to ensure that something remains fair. It just doesn’t happen. I never really knew what was the real reason behind the push for Net Neutrality but I have been around long enough to know that in politics, the sales pitch is usually not the true reason for a given action.

One commissioner recently said that the internet had been run for over 20 years on a “gentleman’s agreement” to be neutral. The interviewer asked her, then why change how it was run with a new regulation? She replied that a few bad actors had tried to usurp the fairness but had to be pushed back using anti-trust and other laws. Her answer begs the question then, about why was it so important to push through a regulation that apparently was not needed. She did not have a good answer in my opinion.

I still do not have a strong opinion one way or the other on neutrality, but most of the arguments I have read speak to unseen harm. None of the things that Net Neutrality has protected us against over the past two years has or had even occurred.

Set aside metered internet access such as wireless or satellite, what we pay for unlimited internet is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket of what it actually costs for the infrastructure. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) need to make money in order to continually upgrade service as we demand better speeds for lower costs. If you think about it, cable operators already restrict us since we cannot stream Fox News, CNN or even local TV stations on the internet without providing a cable or satellite subscription account. Cable cutting has become one of the most confusing and frustrating experiences on the internet today. Look at the movies available. Most of the interesting movies, even the old ones, are not available for streaming, even as part of a subscription such as Netflix or Amazon Prime.

So where is the fairness? No, Virginia, there is no fairness. It is an illusion which has been cooked up to make you feel good. The internet is a great, egalitarian idea and for the most part, the transport layer of bits and bytes actually is fair (unless you live in China, North Korea or some of the Muslim states). What you get from the internet is not. Much of it is restricted and what should be restricted, such as crime and hacking, has no limits.

So, for me, I come down on the Net Neutrality debate wanting it to be like it was, open and unfettered. We in the US have laws which govern antitrust and collusion. Let these laws continue to protect us as they had for over twenty years. With the demise of FCC-regulated Net Neutrality, the policing action in the US falls back to the Federal Trade Commission which has historically done great work protecting people’s rights against big corporations’ attempts to take all of the pie when a very large slice of it does not seem to be enough.

Like everything these days, Net Neutrality has become a game between the left and the right. True to form, the FCC Commissioners have been threatened with a bomb and specifically Ajit Pai, the Chairman, has been threatened and subjected to racist slurs. I do not remember such hysteria when the law-bending rules were put into effect in 2015.

So, let’s see what happens. It is not the end of the world and if removing Net Neutrality will help me stream a Netflix video without it jumping and pausing, then all the better. I can wait 500 more milliseconds for my next browser screen to load.