Local business owners: Neutrality repeal could 'fundamentally change' Internet usage
When the five-member Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday along party lines to repeal Obama-era policies on net neutrality — the agency’s Democratic commissioners dissented in the 3-2 vote — it created a world full of online anxiety, fear, and doubt for many consumers and those in the technology industry.
The arguments surrounding neutrality have been around since the internet became a common tool of the masses in the late 1990s. Its principles maintain that Internet service providers (ISPs) treat all web traffic equally and not show bias or create different fee levels for those services.
In 2015, the FCC approved rules on another party-line vote — three of the five then were Democrats — to make sure cable and phone companies couldn’t manipulate traffic.
What effect the repeal will have has been the subject of countless articles and letters to the FCC since Ajit Pai, a Republican who was named chairman in January by President Donald Trump, announced earlier this year the issue would be reconsidered.
Some in the Amarillo community see a radical change coming.
“It will fundamentally change the way the internet works,” said Tyler Andrews, owner of local IT firm Andrews and Associates and computer repair business cat.man.du.
“You might have to pay more money to go to a specific place, or pay more money to go quickly to a specific place,” Andrews said.
Chris Hatfield, a partner with local marketing services company UCI Online, said the two sides of the issue are protecting consumers and protecting businesses. Supporters of the repeal argued the old rules amount to government overreach.
“I’m not usually a fan of overregulation,” Hatfield said, “but when you give large companies who control the information pipeline the ability to say what information can flow through it, what information can’t, and how fast it can go, you run a high risk of cutting people and smaller businesses out of the information loop.”
After the FCC released its plan late last month, well-known telecom and media analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson wrote in a note to investors that the plan dismantles “virtually all of the important tenets of net neutrality itself.”
But broadband providers dismiss what they characterize as misinformation and irrational fears.
“I genuinely look forward to the weeks, months, years ahead when none of the fire and brimstone predictions come to pass,” said Jonathan Spalter, head of the trade group USTelecom on a call with reporters Wednesday.
Nick Gerlich, the Hickman Professor of Marketing at West Texas A&M University, shares that view.
“I think there’s a lot of fear-mongering going on,” Gerlich said. “There’s a lot of speculation about what might happen, but the naysayers haven’t offered any proof that these things will indeed happen.”
On the day of the vote, Pai said that “The sky is not falling, consumers will remain protected, and the internet will continue to thrive.”
Throttling possibilities
One of the points of contention in the debate is bandwidth throttling, where an ISP intentionally slows the speed of its service. Ostensibly, it is used to manage traffic and control congestion. Hatfield said providers have more ability to throttle now that the rules have changed.
“If you’re a small business whose primary income is from streaming videos,” he said, “an ISP would be able to slow the speed of transmission for that video and charge more if a business wants to send videos back and forth. It changes the playing field.”
Hatfield pointed out bigger companies would be a lot more able to pay those increased charges than small businesses could.
Andrews said throttling also highlights the argument over censorship. He suggested it could happen with large media companies that also own news and information services.
“You might see a certain cable company who also owns a news outlet who throttles connections to other news outlets to make it where their subscriber base makes it to their news outlets,” he said.
Andrews said such companies could use their power to influence how Americans think.
But Gerlich countered that throttling has been around for years.
“Anybody who is an ‘all-you-can-eat’ unlimited data consumer of AT&T knows if you go over your gigabytes a month and you’re in a high-traffic area, you might be throttled,” he said.
Gerlich added that the likelihood of censorship doesn’t scare him either.
“I’m also a huge proponent of the marketplace of ideas, products and services,” he said. “I really do think there will be a lot of self-policing on this. Who can risk being labeled a censor?”
Who do you trust?
Weeks before the FCC met, broadband providers went on record promising to be on their best behavior under the new rules. AT&T’s remarks were typical of the group, saying “all major ISPs have publicly committed to preserving an open internet” and that any provider “foolish” enough to manipulate what’s online will be “quickly and decisively called out.”
The two Amarillo internet businessmen have a different view.
“I think we can look back in the not-too-distant past and see times when that didn’t exactly work out for us,” Andrews said. “Sometimes the ability to profit or the need for profit supersedes the ability to do what’s right.”
Hatfield echoed that opinion.
“If you’ve got the opportunity to make money and nobody to tell you not to make it, how trustworthy are you going to be?” he asked.
Hatfield said it is wrong that the FCC now considers the internet more of a telecom service than the information service upon which it was built.
“The pipeline is the pipeline, period,” he said. “You’re not only going to stifle innovation, you’re going to increase prices and restrict content. It really becomes who controls our thought process.”
Andrews said the new rules will also hurt small businesses that have decided to move to cloud-based services to save on overhead and other costs. He believes higher tolls to access those areas could force many of those businesses to shut down.
“It’ll defeat the purpose of the savings that were coming from the cloud marketplace because you’re now going to be charged to access them,” he said.
Gerlich sees the repeal’s opponents operating from the premise that “the internet is a public utility,” which he questions.
“I just don’t see that because no one owns it,” he declared. “It is cobbled together. It’s a very decentralized service with many different entities and providers.”
He said his own personal worst-case scenario after the repeal is a higher Netflix bill.
“There may be a very real possibility of a Netflix being charged at the corporate level to occupy the amount of bandwidth that it does,” he observed, “and then, of course, that would just be passed on to us as consumers.”
A longer battle
A study by network equipment provider Sandvine found that in March 2016, Netflix represented 35.2 percent of the downstream traffic on fixed networks in North America. Shortly after the FCC decision, the entertainment company tweeted its disapproval.
“This is the beginning of a longer legal battle,” it wrote. “Netflix stands w/ innovators, large &small, to oppose this misguided FCC order.”
But Netflix said in January that weaker net neutrality wouldn’t hurt it because it’s now too popular with users for broadband providers to interfere.
Also in the first hours after the vote, several states began looking into lawsuits against the repeal. Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced he will challenge the vote, saying the FCC failed to follow the Administrative Procedures Act.
Critics are also questioning whether the FCC abided by its legal obligation to review and consider the public’s comments before it voted. Several watchdog groups are calling on Congress to step in and stop the new rules before they take effect. And Democrats, energized by the waves of public protest supporting net neutrality, think it might be a winning political issue for them in the 2018 congressional elections.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.