Why America Needs Net Neutrality
Relatively speaking, compared to issues like race and class, internet equality has not been an issue for a very long time; despite this, in the last decade, it has been one of the most debated matters in the United States Government. The two sides of the issue, for and against net neutrality, have many factional disagreements between them, and two people who have the same viewpoint on the issue might have completely different reasoning for their beliefs. It is not a debate that fits in easily along partisan lines. While it may not be an issue at the forefront of dinner table discussion, how the government solves this issue will affect everybody to varying extents. The question that comes with net neutrality is a simple and yet complicated one: While they are sometimes inefficient and overly-authoritarian, net neutrality rules are entirely necessary for preserving the freedom of information that comes with the internet.
    To begin with some historical background; neutrality of communications has been an issue since the telegram, but the internet itself was not the behemoth web that is around today. It was hardly large enough to be a target for regulation until the 80s. The Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations chose not to enact any regulation, as one might expect. However, the next president’s actions might come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with the issue. At the end of his first term, Bill Clinton worked with a Republican-controlled congress to pass the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Donlan). The act was the first overhaul of telecommunications regulations since the 30s, and its most important tenet was that the FCC would encourage companies to practice net neutrality, but no official regulations would be put in place (“Telecommunications Act of 1996”)
    The rules changed in 2006 when Comcast, the largest telecommunications company at the time, began to severely limit download speed from BitTorrent, a software largely used to download movies, tv shows, and video games illegally. The Bush Jr. administration worked with a Democratic congress to pass, admittedly weak, net neutrality legislation (Wu). More changed when 2008 brought a progressive Democrat to the White House. Obama had campaigned on tightening net neutrality rules. Despite this, many Democrats went against him, voting against stronger net neutrality rules. The president was forced to use executive power to force the FCC to commit to net neutrality in 2014, something that infuriated the opposition. Now, the Republicans are in charge again, and Ajit Pai, the main dissenter against net neutrality in the FCC, is the current chairman; and he plans to work with President Trump to end the regulations (Donlan).
    Ajit Pai (and the President, who endorsed his policies on the campaign trail) represents the conservative opposition to net neutrality. He believes the regulation is unnecessary in the free market economy. Pai wants to take net neutrality rules back to the Clinton era. According to most of the Republican Party, companies that don’t use net neutrality rules will fall out of favor naturally, as people will take their money elsewhere and those companies that do not follow the rules will fall out of favor with the public (Pegoraro). What is more, more money flowing into internet companies for faster connection will mean the companies will be able to lower costs across the board and expand to make more efficient technologies (Donlan).
    This ideology is far from the only one in the anti-regulation camp. Further to the right, there are those who see companies like Facebook and Paypal, the strongest lobbyists for net neutrality, as more threatening to internet equality than companies like Comcast, due to their attempted silencing of hate speech and falsehoods, or “fake news” (Epstein). Take Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudfare. Cloudfare is a company that provides cyber-security to websites: ten percent of all internet requests go through Cloudfare, and 17 campaigns in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election used it for cyber-security (with the notable exception of the Clinton Campaign). Cloudfare recently made the decision to cut service to The Daily Stormer, a message board for white supremacists. Prince believes they made the wrong decision, and that allowing private companies to determine what is or is not appropriate internet conduct sets a dangerous precedent (Prince).
    In order to better understand net neutrality, let's look at the countries that have fully adopted it. It’s a short list: The Netherlands, Chile, Slovenia, Canada, and Japan are the only countries to have passed full net neutrality rules (“Net Neutrality in Various Countries”). Since Canada is America’s neighbor to the north, examining their policies closer should give a better understanding of net neutrality.. Canada’s net neutrality rules are some of the strongest in the world, preventing what is called zero-rating, which consists of giving free data to certain services, such as Netflix. These regulations are along with standard net neutrality rules similar to those currently in place in the U.S. Despite this, the internet is expanding at a rapid rate in Canada, with more and more rural areas escaping a pit trap that affects a vast portion of America as well: only having one choice for an internet provider. The tech industry is booming in Canada, and it may very well be because of net neutrality rules (Engelhart).
    In the end, all the arguments against net neutrality are based on what-ifs. What-if companies commit to net neutrality without regulation, What-if the FCC uses its powers for authoritarian purposes, what-if specific websites abuse free speech more than the service providers. If companies are already committing, and businesses which don’t follow net neutrality fail anyways, what harm would the regulation do? Government overstepping its power is always something the public has to worry about, but the fear of it can never be used to scare everybody into supporting giving away their rights to private corporations. And while companies like Google may also be free speech abusers, that is an entirely separate issue from net neutrality (Berners-Lee).
Ajit Pai and the new FCC do not want to end net neutrality; they just want to make it voluntary. They even admit net neutrality rules have worked to make an open internet; so why fix a system that is not broken? President Trump ran on an economically and socially populist platform, so why abandon those ideals and give people, especially those in the rural areas who voted for him more often than not, an internet at the whim of big corporations? Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and antitrust activist, put it this way: “If Mr. Pai's reasoning sounds forced and unconvincing, it is because this proposal comes right from the swamp, and can be attractive only to those who have lived there long enough to no longer notice the stench. (Wu)” Ajit Pai’s proposed net neutrality rework, which may not even be legal, is certainly not good for people, or even most businesses (Wu).
    Net neutrality regulations are absolutely necessary. While many people say the free market will sort the issue out, far too many internet companies already have monopolies in low-population areas. What’s more, shifting the focus from internet providers to specific websites is simply scapegoating to another issue. When they are analyzed, every argument against net neutrality rules falls flat. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, perhaps summed it up best: “Do we want a web where cable companies determine winners and losers online? Where they decide which opinions we read, which creative ideas succeed? That's not the web I want” (Berners-Lee).



Berners-Lee, Tim. "In Defense of Net Neutrality." Wall Street Journal, 23 Jun 2017, pp. A.13, SIRS Issues Researcher, https://sks.sirs.com.
Donlan, Thomas G. "Net Neutrality is Anything but." Barron's, May 2017, pp. 39, SIRS Issues Researcher, https://sks.sirs.com.
Engelhart, Kenneth. "How Canadians Pay for 'Net Neutrality'." National Post, 24 May 2017, pp. FP.11, SIRS Issues Researcher, https://sks.sirs.com.
Epstein, Mark. "Who's the Real Internet Censor: Comcast Or Facebook?" Wall Street Journal, 06 Sep 2017, pp. A.15, SIRS Issues Researcher, https://sks.sirs.com.
“Net Neutrality in Various Countries.” Business Standard, Business-Standard, 8 Jan. 2016, www.business-standard.com/article/international/net-neutrality-in-different-countries-116010800847_1.html.
Pegoraro, Rob. "Wrong on the Internet." Washington Post, 14 May 2017, pp. B.1, SIRS Issues Researcher, https://sks.sirs.com.
Prince, Matthew. "Was I Right to Pull the Plug on a Nazi Website?" Wall Street Journal, 23 Aug 2017, pp. A.15, SIRS Issues Researcher, https://sks.sirs.com.
“Telecommunications Act of 1996.” Federal Communications Commission, 30 Dec. 2014, www.fcc.gov/general/telecommunications-act-1996. (Primary)
Wu, Tim. "A Phony Fix for Net Neutrality." New York Times, 28 Apr 2017, pp. A.31, SIRS Issues Researcher, https://sks.sirs.com.