Over at the New York Times, Ken Englehart, “a lawyer specializing in communications law, is a senior adviser for StrategyCorp, an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a senior fellow at the C. D. Howe Institute” offers us an astonishing argument suggesting we not worry about the FCC’s move to repeal Net Neutrality. It roughly consists of saying “Don’t worry, corporations will do right by you.” Englehart accepts that the concerns raised by opponents of the FCC–” getting rid of neutrality regulation will lead to a “two-tier” internet: Internet service providers will start charging fees to websites and apps, and slow down or block the sites that don’t pay up…users will have unfettered access to only part of the internet, with the rest either inaccessible or slow”–have some merit for he makes note of abuses by ISPs that confirm just those fears. But he just does not think we need worry that ISPs will abuse their new powers:
[T]hese are rare examples, for a reason: The public blowback was fierce, scaring other providers from following suit. Second, blocking competitors to protect your own services is anticompetitive conduct that might well be stopped by antitrust laws without any need for network neutrality regulations.
How reassuring. “Public blowback” seems unlikely to have any effect on the behavior of folks who run quasi-monopolies. Moreover, the idea that we might should trust our ISPs to not indulge in behavior that “might well be stopped by antitrust laws” also sounds unlikely to assuage any concerns pertaining to the abuse of ISP powers. It gets better, of course:
Net-neutrality defenders also worry that some service providers could slow down high-data peer-to-peer traffic, like BitTorrent. And again, it has happened, most notably in 2007, when Comcast throttled some peer-to-peer file sharing.
But it’s still good:
So why am I not worried? I worked for a telecommunications company for 25 years, and whatever one may think about corporate control over the internet, I know that it simply is not in service providers’ interests to throttle access to what consumers want to see. Neutral broadband access is a cash cow; why would they kill it?
Because service providers will make all the money they need by providing faster services to premium customers and not give a damn about the plebes?
But don’t worry:
[T]here’s still competition: Some markets may have just one cable provider, but phone companies offer increasingly comparable internet access — so if the cable provider slowed down or blocked some sites, the phone company could soak up the affected customers simply by promising not to do so.
Or they could collude, with both charging high prices because they know customers have nowhere to go?
Is this the best defenders of the FCC can do? The old ‘market pressures will make corporations behave’ pony trick? Englehart’s cleverest trick, I will admit, is the aside that “the current net neutrality rule was put in place by the Obama administration.” That’s a good dog-whistle to blow. Anything done by the Obama administration is worth repealing by anyone connected with this administration. And their cronies, like Englehart.
Samir Chopra 