Net neutrality and 'Restoring Internet freedom'


 * This essay is on Wikiversity to encourage a wide discussion of the issues it raises moderated by the Wikimedia rules that invite contributors to “be bold but not reckless,” contributing revisions written from a neutral point of view, citing credible sources -- and raising other questions and concerns on the associated '“Discuss”' page.

Quite possibly the single most consequential action of the Trump administration short of nuclear war is their efforts to destroy net neutrality. They claim they are "restoring Internet freedom", being the freedom of major Internet access providers like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Spectrum (formerly Chartered and TWC) to block, throttle, alter (including stripping encryption), and redirect your requests for information from the Internet.

This is an issue that many people have not even heard of.

It's not well known partly because the mainstream media have a conflict of interest in reporting on it.

It's consequential, because if Trump's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) succeeds in destroying net neutrality, it will be much harder for individuals and small businesses to reach an audience, and much harder for Internet entrepreneurs to develop new ways of using the Internet. That's because Internet access providers have in the past and will in the future, block, throttle, alter, and redirect content they don't like and increase their rates to deliver content at the standard high speeds that everyone now expects. Internet access providers do not want competition from individuals, small businesses and Internet startups.

What is net neutrality, and why is it important?
Net neutrality is the principle that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally by Internet access providers.


 * Net neutrality means that anyone with an Internet connection can compete in the marketplace of ideas based solely on the quality of their presentation.

Net neutrality is important, because


 * Progress on many and perhaps all substantive issues facing humanity today is blocked, because every countermeasure threatens someone with substantive control over the media.

We next consider a few examples of media bias.

Saudi Arabia and Islamic terrorism
A US government document declassified July 15, 2016, included summaries of FBI records from 1999 of incidents apparently funded by the Saudis testing US security measures in preparation for the September 11 attacks. Moreover, the Bush administration knew this before invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

Other documentation establishes that the Saudis have been a primary driver of ISIL.


 * Why is the US still supporting the Saudis?



Vietnam War
Less than three years after Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, he wrote that everyone he had communicated with who was knowledgeable about Vietnam agreed “that had elections been held at the time of the fighting [leading to the defeat of the French in 1954], possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh”. If Eisenhower had supported Vietnamese elections planned for 1956, the US would not have supported a government whose mistreatment of its own population was a primary contributor to its defeat in 1975. However, Eisenhower felt unable to do this, apparently because Ho Chi Minh's popularity was virtually unknown in the US.


 * If all of Eisenhower's sources agreed about this, why was the US public so uninformed?

Eisenhower was hoping to be elected to a second term as President in 1956 and may not have wanted to explain why he had "lost Vietnam to Communism."



How terrorist groups end
A 2008 RAND study reported that among the 268 terrorist groups they found that ended between 1968 and 2006, more terrorist groups won than were defeated militarily. Far more effective were negotiations, like those with the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, and law enforcement.


 * Why is the West using the least effective approach to terrorism?



U.S. incarceration rate
After being relatively stable for the 50 years from 1925 to 1975, the incarceration rate in the US shot up by a factor of five in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This increase in incarcerations occurred without a corresponding change in crime rates. This change has been explained as a product of decisions by mainstream commercial broadcasters to focus on the police blotter while firing nearly all their investigative journalists. A few popular programs like “60 Minutes” were exceptions.


 * The incarceration rate is a function of public perception of crime, which is unrelated to the crime rate, at least in the US between 1925 and 2014.

That works for a couple of reasons. First, the crime rate is low enough that most people's perceptions of crime come primarily from the media. Second, public policy tends to be set by what sounds right, ignoring substantial bodies of research on what policies are actually effective, because they are rarely featured in the mainstream media.


 * Major broadcasters made out like bandits, while their audiences were largely unaware of what they had lost from the near elimination of investigative journalism.

Progress blocked by media bias
These examples, and similar analyses of other intractable problems, can be explained as natural products of two general principles:


 * Every media organization in the world sells changes in audience behaviors to the people who pay their bills.


 * Media organizations rarely bite the hands that feed them. They must flinch before disseminating any information that might offend a major advertiser or anyone else with substantive control over their budgets or operations.

Many if not all major problems facing humanity today are impacted by these two issues. Other factors impact different major problems differently, but media funding and governance is an underappreciated universal issue.

Better media in general and net neutrality in particular are threats to major leaders the world over, which explains the “Great Firewall of China” and why Turkey is blocking Wikipedia. Net neutrality makes it easier for the bottom 99.5 percent of the human population to obtain better information on options available to them and to organize to better defend and promote their own interests.

One theory, based on "following the money", would seem to explain the difficulties in achieving progress in these and other intractable problems:


 * The most important information Americans need to protect their interests is rarely fit to print in the New York Times, because it would offend major advertisers -- and is similarly not fit to disseminate in other commercial media.



Trump's FCC tries to overturn net neutrality
Everyone, including major Internet access providers and the Trump administration officially agrees with net neutrality. However, Trump and his supporters claim that the 2015 Title II Order that made it possible to enforce "net neutrality" increased regulatory uncertainty, which forced major companies in this market to reduce their capital expenditures (CapEx) for investments in new high speed Internet infrastructure.

The drop in 2015 CapEx sounds big at almost a billion dollars but is less than three quarters of the annual changes since 1996. This is visible in the accompanying plot of U.S. Broadband CapEx investment, cited but not plotted in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on "Restoring Internet Freedom" published May 18 by Trump's FCC. The damage they claim does NOT make sense if one actually looks at the available data.

To save the nation from this minuscule damage, which they claim is major, they propose transferring net neutrality enforcement to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the antitrust division of the Department of Justice.

Those opposing this action argue the following:

and FTC and antitrust enforcement cannot adequately protect consumers, small businesses and Internet startups. Previous abuses by Internet access providers led to several things:
 * 1. History records that the Title II Order provides the only way that a typical American will be able to find an Internet access provider who will NOT block, throttle, alter (including stripping encryption), or redirect their requests for information from the Internet. In addition to the EFF comments (2017), the Engineers' letter (2017), and the Wikipedia article on "Net neutrality in the United States",  Commissioner Clyburn noted in her dissent in FCC Restoring Internet Freedom (2017) that FCC Chairman Pai and others complained in 2015 that the Obama administration had not invested enough time and other resources in economic research to evaluate the impact of their Title II Order before adopting it.  However, Pai and others proceeded to overturn the Title II Order without any apparent consideration of research like what they had previously requested.  In fact, there are two economists who are acknowledged leaders in studying "market power", focusing especially on the structure of telecommunications.  They found, in brief, that there is little honest competition in this market, and this is a problem for the future of the international economy:  Jean Tirole, who won the 2014 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for seminal research in this area, and Eli Noam, author and editor of many recent works in this area.  See ,
 * eight years of increasing activism on this issue,
 * multiple lesser remedies by the FCC that were blocked by courts,
 * 3.7 million comments on a proposed FCC action in 2014
 * that led to the Title II Order, and
 * almost 22 million comments on “Restoring Internet freedom” filed by the August 30 deadline.


 * 2. All relevant data that is reasonably available and credible indicate that the Title II Order is working to benefit society as a whole without seriously damaging Internet access providers. The New York Times said Trump's FCC had to cherry-pick their data to get numbers supporting their desired policy change. Ernesto Falcon, Legislative Council with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the publicly traded companies in that market have not mentioned the Title II Order in their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is the only place with credible penalties for misleading comments.  There, they've said that business is good. Free Press analyzed 26 different financial measures that could reflect the impact on the industry of the Title II Order.  Only five of the 26 were negative.  Only two seemed statistically significant, and those showed improvements (not damage as Trump's FCC claims).  It's not clear if any of these changes resulted from the Title II Order.
 * 3. Since the Title II Order, consumers have benefitted from being able to use Internet applications and devices that had previously been blocked.


 * 4. If the FCC decides to move forward with parts of their proposed changes, “the result will have a disastrous effect on innovation in the Internet ecosystem”, according to Internet engineers and pioneers: Without enforceable net neutrality, effective deployment of new Internet capabilities would require permissions that would rarely be profitably available to a startup.

However, it seems likely that this issue will move from the FCC to Congress, because the stakes are huge, as indicated above. Ernesto Falcon, Legislative Council for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “People need to take it to the next step, which is ... meet your elected officials, your two Senators and member of the House ..., because it’s only through mobilization that we’ll win this.”

Many consumer advocacy groups are organizing around this issue through a coalition called “BattleForTheNet.com”.