Tom Wheeler
October 30, 2023
- On October 19, the FCC voted to begin reinstating net neutrality rules, reigniting a longstanding controversy about how the internet should be regulated.
- Internet service providers characterize net neutrality as a simple prohibition of “blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization,” which they claim they don’t do.
- However, net neutrality is much more important: The question is whether the companies that provide the internet, a vital service, should be accountable for behaving in a “just and reasonable” manner.
On October 19, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to reinstate the agency’s 2015 decision that brought internet service providers (ISPs) under the agency’s jurisdiction as Telecommunications Carriers. This action is necessary because the Trump FCC repealed the previous rule in 2018 at the request of the ISPs. Predictably, the telecom industry and its allies in Congress have come out with guns blazing in opposition to the recent FCC proposal.
Also, predictably, the debate is being mischaracterized around a few tried-and-true buzz phrases that obscure the importance of what is being proposed.
The term “net neutrality” was coined in 2003 by Columbia professor Tim Wu. It was an innovative nomenclature that picked up on the ability of the ISPs to discriminate for their own economic advantage. Net neutrality became commonly described as whether the companies could create “fast la
