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Today, the FCC Commission voted to repeal net neutrality protections by a margin of 3 to 2. The long-expected move followed popular outcry including physical demonstrations and two days of online protest in the form of a "Break the Internet" campaign which rallied giants like Reddit, Mozilla, Cloudflare, Pinterest, and Github as well as rank-and-file enthusiasts to its cause. Unlike the efforts to save the net from the scourge of SOPA in 2012 and to defend net neutrality in 2014, this movement was ultimately unsuccessful. The fundamental nature of the internet is now destined to change, and not for the better.
There is hope for the reinstatement of net neutrality regulations, most immediately through a potential Congressional review, but chances grow slimmer with each passing day. Representatives from Congress on both sides of the aisle spoke out prior to the FCC's decision, and legislation could reinstate net neutrality rules, but inertia will be a major force. Congress has historically been unable to decisively legislate the issue and recently sided with big telecom on the matter of your privacy, not to mention lawmakers have plenty of other things to worry about. And thanks to the FCC, the position that lawmakers will be legislating from is not one of preserving regulation, but rather of whipping up something new. An extremely tall order.
So what can we expect going forward? According to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, we’ll see more investment in the web, though that argument is dubious at best and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn delivered a powerful but doomed counterargument during the hearing. Telecoms, meanwhile, promise business as usual—no blocking, not throttling, no funny business. Of course, they do this while simultaneously working to repeal anything that holds them to those standards and ignoring their own previous attempts at exactly the sort of behavior that net neutrality prohibits.
Despite terrifying visions of tiered internet services similar television cable packages, the future of a non-neutral internet could be oppressive in more covert ways. If you do not currently have a data cap on your home connection, you might be wise to brace for one that charges you extra if you use too much data. This rationing (much more immediately profitable than increasing bandwidth through investment in infrastructure) sets the stage for what we’ve already seen from cellular providers unburdened by net neutrality: exceptions to the rule for certain services that pay for the privilege, or that your ISP prefers for whatever self-interested reason. This preferential treatment, in turn, can be presented as an improvement over draconian caps. It is! But it is also just a watered-down version of what used to be normal, and what may quickly fade from memory.
Concentration of power around already established service providers brings all sorts of problems even with net neutrality in place. Facebook toys with extorting publishers for access to their followers while allowing advertisers to promote fake news far and wide. Google features search results that highlight egregiously false information as its online shopping results face anti-trust penalties in the EU. Twitter’s de facto online public square has abuse policies that enforce a flagrant double standard and are suspiciously friendly to actual, self-avowed Nazis.
"Platform creep" that has congealed the open web around these increasingly powerful corporate fiefdoms has been building for years already. On an ostensibly neutral internet, where there is a foundational presumption of equality between services big and small, these challenges could be surmountable with a one-two punch of trust-busting and innovation. But a non-neutral internet will attempt to gently and firmly close the door by giving incumbents a permanent leg up. The repeal of net neutrality is not a catastrophic event that will immediately and clearly shatter the web, but it is the installation of a lens that will focus and intensify the internet’s worst qualities at a more fundamental level than ever before. This is the start a slide that there may not be any coming back from.
The overwhelming cost of a non-neutral internet may not be what we lose, but what we fail to gain. In a moment where the giants of the internet are shuddering under their own weight, and virtually every combination of cable companies has either merged or attempted to, the repeal of net neutrality lends all parties involved the ability to leverage their power into more power. Even in the face of users’ general distaste and a hunger for alternatives, attempts to upset the stale status quo will almost assuredly become more difficult.
If there still is a way back, it will be an uphill battle. Let's just hope that, years from now, we won't have to merely remember when the internet was good.
This article was originally published on December 12th, 2017 and has been updated to reflect the official repeal of net neutrality regulation.
