Revisiting Net Neutrality

and different countries deal with this in different ways. As per usual, I'll be focusing on the United States in this episode as that is where I am from. It is also the birthplace of the Internet itself. But keep in mind that net neutrality is an issue that is dealt with in various ways all around the world. Some countries are a little more um a man double to net neutrality than others. Some countries are infamously about as far away from net neutrality as you can get, like China,

for example, in the Great Firewall there. But we're gonna focus mostly on the US. Also, I should add that I have covered this topic a few times before. If you'd like to listen to earlier episodes of tech Stuff in which I go into further detail for some of the concepts i'll talk about today, You can check out the following shows. The first is How Net Neutrality Works, which published way back in December two thousand and eight.

That means that was in the first six months of tech Stuff and it shows, but it also has my former co host Chris Palette on there, and together we try to explain what that neutrality is all about and why it was such a contentious topic then and even

more so now, you could argue. Next, I have The War on Net Neutrality, which published on February twelve, two thousand fourteen, so much more recent, And then almost a year later, on February nine, two thousand fifteen, we published the episode what is a Common Carrier, which talked about the FCCS decision to change the classification of Internet service providers into common carriers. Uh, if you want to know

more about that, you can check out those episodes. I'll cover some of that today because it's impossible to talk about this topic and get you guys up to speed without covering that. But if you want to look at more specifics, check out those episodes. So, the battle of net neutrality has been making headlines again recently, which is the reason why I'm recording this, and I think it's a topic that not everyone totally grasps. So today we're

going to cover the basic definitions for net neutrality. We're gonna talk about the different entities that are in disagreement over net neutrality and their arguments and where things seem to be headed. And I should also point out that I record Tech Stuff episodes about a month before they come out, so it is entirely possible that some of the stuff I covered today will already be a bit

out of date by the time the show publishes. But you can always tune in to watch me do a show live on twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff, except for today when it isn't working, but most days it is working and you can check me out. Just go to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff and you'll find a schedule when I stream and record the show. All right, enough of all that, let's talk about the Internet. It's a little box with a light on top, and it's stored at the top of Big Ben according to the

I T crowd. All right, but before there was even an Internet, there was the ARPA net. Now, this was a project launched by ARPA. ARPA was the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Today we call it DARPA. The D stands for Defense, so now it's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DERBA is in charge of research and development for the Department of Defense in the United States, and they look at lots of different things that could potentially have use

in matters of defense. It doesn't necessarily have to be the primary purpose for it, but that's always part of it. So some other big DARPA initiatives besides the ARPA NET include the driverless car initiative, which is what really got us into the early days of autonomous cars. Google's driverless car really got its start as a project under this uh there was a team from Stanford that competed in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and a lot of those folks

went on to work for Google. But there are other ones as well, including some interesting stuff about ways to bio hack a brain so that you can learn better. You'll have to check out Forward Thinking to learn more about that. But ARPA was really interested in developing technologies that would allow computer systems to communicate with each other. This would obviously increase the value and power of computer systems.

If you could have different research facilities that are across the United States from one another sending information back and forth via computer directly. Then that would be a very powerful tool. And uh, ultimately you could even see other applications such as having a decentralized network where if part of the network were to fail for some reason, let's say there was a massive power failure on part of the United States, the rest of the network could continue

to function, but they needed to invent it. There wasn't anything in place at that time that could allow it, and so to do this they had to hire a whole bunch of really smart people to design the algorithms and protocols that would allow for communication even between computers that didn't use the same programming languages. So, in other words, if you had two different computers that worked on vastly different architectures and languages, you still had to be able

to let them communicate with each other. So you had to invent kind of a common set of rules that both could follow and have meaningful communication. So these techniques eventually would evolve into the foundation for the Internet itself, um, although some of them would go through many evolutions before they turned into the stuff that is, you know, kind

of the the software backbone for the Internet. Now, this entire project started here in the United States, and that's kind of why I mentioned the US is where the Internet was born, because the Arpanet was sort of a predecessor to the Internet UH and eventually was incorporated into the Internet in some extent to some extent rather and UH before it was dismantled officially, it was in the U S where engineers built this technology that makes the

Internet possible. Though it's important to point out that other key elements of today's Internet, such as the Worldwide Web, those originated in other countries. So it's not like the US had a lock on all things Internet, but this is where it got its start. Now, one thing that's our relatively simple concept is just the basic idea of net neutrality. The term was popularized and possibly coined by Tim Wu who is a law professor, although originally it

was called network neutrality. He wrote a paper in two thousand three about this idea, and he defined it in terms of assuming a non discriminatory stance on Internet traffic at the Internet service provider level. So that's a fancy way of saying that Internet service providers I s p s the companies that actually provide the access to the Internet so that you can get on there and watch your YouTube videos and subscribe to your podcasts, and do your work and send your email and all that kind

of stuff. They wouldn't be allowed to discriminate against any type of traffic, no matter where it was coming from, if they were part of the Internet. That's the idea of net neutrality. Everyone plays fair. Everyone allows everyone else to UH to send information across the networks. Otherwise than the Internet breaks. If you don't have net neutrality, then you have all these different UH relationships between entities that make it difficult, if not impossible, to operate the Internet

in a reasonable fashion. So net neutrality in part is kind of a necessity, at least at a certain level. Now. Lawrence Lessig, who's a Harvard law professor, said net neutrality was all about single principle he called E two E and that's E the numeral two and the letter E

again that stands for end to end. So in other words, he's saying, it doesn't matter what entities you're talking about, whether it's a server and a server, whether it's an I s P and an I s P, whether it's a computer and a web server or a handheld device like a smartphone and an application and server. It doesn't matter what the entities are. It should just be neutral. The Internet should be a dumb neutral conduit for information,

no matter whether information starts or ends its journey. In practice, this means that you, as an Internet user, should be able to access any and all information without discrimination. Now, one little complication in this is that not all information is strictly legal, at least not in every country, or

it might be illegal to distribute the information. Maybe saying the information is illegal itself is a little weird, but it's illegal to distribute it uh, or, as is more common in the United States, some uses of the Internet are illegal because they involve other illegal activities. So using the Internet to sell illegal goods like weapons or drugs without the proper licensing and the proper authorization, that would be a good example there. So those would be exceptions

to of this idea. But let's eliminate all the illegal stuff for the time being and just talk about legal data. We're gonna make an assumption that the information we're talking about for most of this podcast is all on the up and up. So this isn't like stolen information. It's not uh, you know, illegal for other means, it's standard stuff and it should be treated neutral e. Net neutrality is a state in which all of this data gets treated the same way. None of it gets preferential treatment,

none of it gets penalized. So it shouldn't matter what sort of device you use to access the Internet, whatever it is, it should work just fine on every I s P. That's another aspect of net neutrality. Whether it's a laptop, a desktop, tablet, smartphone, console, or other device, you should be able to connect it to the Internet, assuming of course, that the device itself isn't breaking any laws, or there's not some other issue like you're trying to

overload the network or whatever. Net neutrality covers all of those different aspects. You should be able to act, says, any information originating from any web server, on any device, on any network. Now, the history of net neutrality has

been a really bumpy one. Back in two thousand seven, the Associated Press published accusations that Comcast, a major Internet service provider here in the United States, have been blocking some customers from using BitTorrent software to download videos, and that Comcast really wanted to stifle anything that competed with its own video on demand service. So using BitTorrent by itself is not illegal. You could use BitTorrent to download

perfectly legal content. Let's say that someone has produced a video that isn't isn't violating copyright law. It's their own original work and they've decided they wanted to distribute it via BitTorrent. BitTorrent is just ap peer to peer sharing service. It has nothing to do with the actual content, sort of like the Internet itself. You wouldn't say the Internet is all about ending illegal stuff from one place to another, even though a lot of people use the Internet to

do that. That's not what the Internet actually is. The same is true for bit Torrent. BitTorrent is a method of sending information using peer to peer networks. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're using it to steal stuff. Well, Comcast was being accused of throttling the data transfers of people using BitTorrent software. Essentially, the accusation said, Comcast detected

these customers, Comcast customers, we're using bit torrent software. They were connecting with other bit torrent users, and so they would find their connections slowed down dramatically whenever they were using BitTorrent, And meanwhile Comcast was pushing its own video on demand service saying, hey, you should just buy the

videos straight from US. Public interest groups would eventually get in touch with the f c C here in the United States, the FCC kind of sort of oversaw I s p S. And I say kind of sort of because at the time there wasn't a real strong argument to be made that the FCC had that sort of domain. It was sort of in their domain, but there were

no formal laws or regulations that put the FCC in charge. Now, the FCC argued that Comcast, which was supposed to act as a neutral carrier of information, was using anti competitive practices to suppress a competing service. And so there was a vote and the f c C passed a three to two vote against Comcasts. So f CC's board, as you know, five members, and what they would vote on these issues about whether or not a company had violated some rule or regulation and then determine what what steps

should be taken in response to that. In this case, it was a close vote three to two. Two Democrats and a Republican voted against Comcast. It was actually a majority Republican board at that time. So the f c C said to Comcast, hey stop it, use guys, but they didn't find Comcasts. They just demanded that Comcast halt this behavior, that they stopped throttling customers. Comcasts response was you aren't the boss of me, and I'm gonna sue you.

And that's exactly what happened. So this lawsuit last several years and in two a federal court dismissed the fccs earlier ruling. Now why did they do that, Well, the FCC was claiming that under Title one of a Communications Act they would be able to do this, but it really was a pretty loose interpretation of the law, and the federal court said the FCC just did not have the authority to slap Comcasts risks in the first place.

So even though Comcast wasn't fined, the essentially what the federal court was say was, you can't even reprimand Comcast, you don't have that authority. You're not you're not in charge of this. Uh. It would be like someone you know telling you that you need to pull over for speeding, but they're not a police officer. It would be weird. It's not really their job. Well, later that year, the f c C passed some official regulations on net neutrality.

So essentially, what the FCC was trying to do was say, hey, we totally have the authority to do this. They were attempting to codify rules they had set up for real zes. But then Verizon sued the f c C and said, you can't do that. You don't have the authority to set these regulations, and you're passing rules that you don't get to pass, so stop it now. The Federal Court agreed once again with the industry and said the FCC

does not have that authority now. Eventually, this led to a lot of pressure on the FCC to create real rules for net neutrality deep and there was talk for a while of something that was more of a conciliatory approach, but the Obama administration in two thousand and fourteen put a lot of pressure on the FCC to draw up more stringent rules about net neutrality, and so that eventually led to the Open Internet Order of I'm gonna talk more about that later in this episode and give you

more details about what that Open Internet Order really was all about. But The important thing to remember right now is that the industry responded by challenging this order and trying to take it to courts, but so far the courts have upheld the FCCS ruling. They said that everything is technically legal here with a recent court decision declining to re hear the arguments. So essentially, the industry appealed

this decision. The higher court said, no, we're not gonna bother listening to this because we agree with the lower court, or rather, we don't see an to re hear this case. And a lot of big is s p s got a little mad about this, and there's now a move to move this case all the way up to the Supreme Court. Now, in addition, with a change of administrations in the United States government, you may have heard something about that over the last year or so, we're looking

at yet another revision of the rules. But I'm going to get into all of that a bit later in this podcast. Now, the reason all of this is important is because the Internet is a network of networks. That's how it started and that's what it is now. Although the details have changed significantly. The network of networks doesn't work exactly the same way it did when the Internet was a brand new, little baby. You could make a persuasive argument that the old definition of net neutrality isn't

really an accurate argument to make these days. And that's because many entities like Google or Amazon or Netflix have their systems embedded into the infrastructure on the Internet in ways that weren't the case in the early days. So this gets back to Internet service providers. These networks that allow the connections of customers, whether those customers are people like you and me, if their businesses, if there are other I s p s that are lowered down on

the chain, they there. These are the companies that allow the inner connections on the Internet. So let's take a look at how things used to be and compared to how things are now to kind of understand why the argument of net neutrality is changing a little bit. First of all, no one owns the Internet as a whole, because the Internet is a bunch of different components owned

by a bunch of different companies. So it's it's not like a car where you could have one person be the owner, or even one person to be the manufacturer. It's a it's a huge complicated machine and different intoities own different parts of this machine. No one has the say of how it should be run. Like there's no one who has controlling interest in the Internet, but the actual infrastructure is owned by a bunch of different companies

and other entities. Internet service providers run the networks that allow customers to connect transmit received data over the Internet.

So if each I s P was totally independent, as in it was its own network and it did not have any connectivity to other networks, so this is not an Internet, this is just a a single network, well, you would only be able to access the stuff that was connected through that specific I s P. So let's say you are a customer of I s P A, but Netflix was only on I s P B. Well,

that would mean you wouldn't be able to watch Netflix. Fortunately, the Internet is the network of all these networks together, and so they connect to each other through network access points or n A P S naps. Man and NAP sounds good right about now? Well, naps are exchanges that allow traffic to switch from one network to another in

its journey from origin to destination. So using the Internet, you could watch Netflix even if you're on I s P A. Netflix is on I s p B. When you send that request, it goes through one of these network access points, switches over from one network to another, gets the go ahead from the server on I s p B. The information is sent back more or less in a reverse path from the one that your request took. Keeping in mind that the way the Internet works, the

information branches out in all sorts of different ways. It's not like it's a single pathway from point A to point B and you would still be able to watch it. That's in the old days. Uh. These naps are exchanges that allow all that journey to happen, you know, for the data to switch from one network to another. Routers are the devices that take care of traffic control, sending data where it's need and not sending it where it

is not needed. That's equally important because you don't want to have superfluous data running around the Internet gumming things up. There is a limited carrying capacity to the Internet. Uh, it's huge, but you know, if you were to send an enormous amount of data to a very specific section of the Internet at a specific time, you could overload things.

You can make stuff slow down, you can make systems crash, so rollers are very important to make sure that that data is going where it needs to go and only where it needs to go. In the early days the Internet, there were hundreds of companies that were interconnected to create this network, and the distribution of traffic was pretty you know, decent, it's pretty even. There weren't a few, just a few

entities dominating traffic across the Internet. It was distributed fairly evenly, and that neutrality was real concerned because if someone didn't play ball, it kind of ruined it for everyone else. Well, I got more to say about the basics of the Internet and how net neutrality plays into it, but before I jump into more of that, let's take a quick

break to thank our sponsor. Okay, Now, for the Internet to work, these various Internet service providers have to agree to carry each other's traffic, and typically we call this process peering, where companies will peer with one another, whether it's two I s p s or an I s P and an edge provider. Edge providers being like the content providers that are creating the stuff that people are

actually trying to access. So the I s P s you can think of that as like almost like a highway system and the the edge providers being like all the stuff along the highways that you want to go to, and peering involves drawing up an agreement where the various decent question will allow for the transfer of data coming from one source to pass over to the other source,

for one network to pass over into the other network. Basically, if you were a smaller Internet service provider, you would have to pay a certain amount per chunk of data up to larger Internet service providers that are further upstream

of you. If a smaller I s P gets big enough, if it grows over time, it could end up creating that same arrangement with smaller I s p s that are downstream of it, and it could arrange for a more favorable rate with the larger upstream I s p s. If it got big enough, it could have the leverage to say, hey, let's rework this deal, or even if they got big enough, arrange for free transfers of data if the size and traffic between the two I s

p s is similar enough. Alright, so let's say that you are the head of a big old Internet corporation and your company has assets and several different parts of the Internet so your computers and connections make up to the Internet's backbone, and data crosses over your machines all the time, so you are actually part of the infrastructure that information uses in order to get from point A to point B. Some of that data comes from you, so you happen to have stuff within your own network

that you can deliver to people who are on your network. Uh, you have your own servers services, maybe you have like an email client, maybe some website sites, but a lot of data actually comes from other sources, including people who are in direct competition with you. Now, wouldn't it be nice if you're the head of this large corporation if you could steer people to using your own in house products like your email services, your websites, etcetera, rather than

a competitor's services. You could have people use your email client, visit your streaming video service, and go to your web pages for news. You'd collect revenue from that through ads served against the services. You'd end up saving money because people are coming to you run then you going to them. You can discourage people from using competitors products as a result, or you could do something else, maybe you charge your competitors a hefty premium to get access to customers on

your network. So you're the head of is s P A and I s p B comes to you and says, hey, we've got a lot of customers who want to access these servers. Those servers are part of your network. What do we have to do to make that happen? And you say, well, uh, you'll have to pay me. If you don't pay me, I'll make sure it's a super slow connection and your customers will be able to access the information, but it will be a very negative experience.

They will hate it, it will take forever, it will buffer a lot for streaming video, or you know, you pony up the cash and then everyone's gonna get super fast internet access from me. It's gonna be awesome. So um, if you were to say, hey, Netflix, I'm happy to send people Season two a fuller house, but if you want them to have a good experience, you got a pony up that cash so the stream get the fast

length of traffic. Otherwise I'm just gonna throw all that data, keep it on my own network, keep everything nice and clear, and your customers will experience lots of buffering issues and then everyone's gonna say, hey, why are we even using this I s P. Let's use this other I s P. Because I hear that I can watch Fuller House with less buffering, And Jesse is gonna say, oh, mercy, well, how am I going to see that if I'm not logged in? But that would violate the spirit of the

net neutrality. If you gave your own data preferential treatment and allowed it to stream faster to customers, and you throttled anything from your competitors, then people using your service wouldn't have fair equal access to all information on the Internet when using your network. And that's how a lot of people frame the net neutrality argument these days, that there's just this one big problem with that framing. It's not really an accurate description of what's actually happening. On

a large scale. Over time, a relatively small number of companies began to dominate the amount of traffic that was moving across the Internet. In other words, a smaller number of companies were creating a larger amount of the data

that gets shuffled around across the Internet. Big companies like Google, Netflix, and other major players began to establish what are called content delivery networks or c d NS now content delivery network is a network of computer servers that are within an I s P S network and they can deliver specific content directly to that I s P S customers without the need for traveling across appeared network from another I s P. So, going back to I s P A versus I s P B, if you build a

c d N in both of those I s P S networks, so you've got one in I s P A and one in I s P B, those respective Internet service provider customers can access your services very very quickly because you've you've placed them close to the destination, close to being a relative term, because we're talking about uh, you know, networks which are not really it's not analogous to a physical location. But if you have it within that I s P there are fewer gateways to have

to pass through, so you speed up the process. You create a better user experience, especially for stuff that uses a lot of data and needs to stream very quickly. So stuff like ultra high definition video, you obviously want that to get to your customers as quickly as it can. Otherwise you've got lots of buffering issues, and that's not a very good experience from a consumer point of view.

So if you're someone like YouTube or Netflix, you want to establish these uh c d ns, these content delivery networks inside as many major I s p s as you possibly can to get uh that information to customers much more quickly. Uh So, let's compare the old way of doing things with a new way. So back in the early days of the Internet, your web company servers would be connected to I s P A, and your customers would access your service by connecting to your web

server over the Internet. Any of your customers who are also I s P A customers would have a pretty direct connection because you're all on the same network. But if I were your customer and I used I s P B, my request would have to pass through a piered connection between my I s P and your I s P before it reached your web server, and any data you said back to me would likewise have to go through that piered connection, And if my I s P and your I s P got to a spat,

that could become a problem. But c d n s allow entities to build web servers within different I s p s, so you get that direct connection and you can bypass this need for those peered connections, companies like Google, Netflix, and Facebook, I'll have private c d n s to help them get this stated to you quickly. There are also other c d n s that are run by

other companies that essentially rent out space two tenants. So let's say that you have a big c d N within Comcasts network and you say, hey, if you want your service to get to Comcast customers faster, you can rent out space on our machines which are part of this content delivery network within Comcasts network, and that will get to the Comcast customers smoothly. You just had to pay us and we'll host your stuff. So why does

this matter? Because the old argument about net neutrality doesn't quite work in a world where thirty companies provide half of all the Internet's traffic. Think about that. Just a little more than two dozen companies comprise half of the

Internet's traffic, with Netflix leading the charge. Most of those companies operate c d N or they partner with one of those companies I just talked about that have their own c d ns, and you don't have to worry about I S p B throttling stuff coming from S P A. Because both B and A have all the

information within their own respective networks. The fast lane argument is less of a problem than it used to be because we already have this established hierarchy of major companies that in itself is its own problem because a lot of people point out by having these enormous established companies that are able to take advantage of this, it discourages competition from smaller companies that don't have those same advantages.

So a different problem is on the rise, and this one is more related to uh, well, it's kind of related to the fast lane issue, but with some twists. The big I s p s that have swallowed up most of the smaller ones have a real tight grip

on access to the Internet. They would very much like to build their own c d n s. So Comcast has talked about this, making their own content delivery networks within their their networks, and then they would charge companies to use those c d n s. So, in other words, they're doing kind of what I was talking about with those other companies that would say, hey, we will rent out space to you, except this would be the actual Internet service provider allowing that, So kind of having your

cake and eating it too. If you were to launch an internet startup company and you felt like you needed to have that super fast access to Comcast customers, uh you like, maybe you're trying to deliver that ultra high definition videos experience. You might need to be in a c d N to have reliable access to an I S B S customers. But you're not big enough to build your own one, so you can't be like Google

or Facebook or Netflix. You aren't haven't been around long enough, you can't establish that, so you have to cut a deal with someone who already has a c d N and you have to rent space there. Essentially, the result is that internet service providers could be getting paid twice for all the data going across their networks. They get one fee from their subscribers, their actual regular customers who are consuming data, and another fee from the companies that

are providing data. So you can charge the for the same message two times. It's like the old days with telegrams. In fact, this story eventually goes all the way back to the telegram days. If you listen to the Common Carrier episode, you learn more about it, and it really it goes back even further than that. It goes to the railroad days, but telegram days. You know, there were arguments about telegram companies charging once to send a message at once for the receiving of the message, so each

message was getting billed twice. People said, that's not very fair. Well, the same thing is kind of showing up here with this concept of an I s P operating its own content delivery network. So how can we avoid such a future. Well, one thing that would be nice is more competition in

the internet service provider space. Competition would push Internet service providers to stay nim bowl and they wouldn't be able to throw their weight around so much because if they did, customers could say, well, I don't want to work with this company anymore. I'm gonna go and switch to their competitor, who and their competitors not engaged in this kind of behavior. So that that threat of competition, that threat of losing customers to someone else that's not doing the messed up

stuff you're doing, would help a lot. But we don't have a whole lot of competition, particularly here in the United States. So short of breaking up companies or placing hefty regulations on how Internet service providers operate, this is a long shot. Now, as I record this podcast, there are hearings in the United States Congress that could overturn large portions of the two thousand fifteen Open Internet Order. There's also discussions within the f c C itself that

would overturn this decision, this twenty decision. So the one within the f c C is titled Restoring in Internet Freedom, which, um, you know, I I like, there was a tweet I saw. I wish I could remember the person who said it, but the tweet said essentially, anytime you see a large corporation using the word freedom within some legislation, or any entity within politics using the word freedom within its legislation, it usually means freedom for big companies, not for actual citizens,

which is a little cynical and a lot true. Bottom line, Restoring Internet Freedom Act is some loaded language, but then so is open Internet. So what's actually going on. Well, back in the f c C reclassified broadband Internet Access service or bias. That's not me being biased, that's just what the acronym says, broadband Internet access service. They reclassified them as telecommunications services, which meant that companies in that field would be governed by the rules of Titled two

of the Communications Act of nineteen four. Now, you remember before the FCC tried to uh to enforce regulations under Title one of the Communications Act, but that didn't really give the FCC the authority they needed to do that, and that's why those decisions got overturned in federal courts. So FCC said, well, that's fine, we'll just well, we have to reclassify these companies, these broadband Internet access services

as telecommunications companies. That will put them under Title two, which we have the authority to oversee that has been established by law. And this was something that people have been bandying about for a few years, but the FCC hadn't really taken a move on it because it was seen as being a little extreme. However, the Obama administration was putting in a lot of pressure on the FCC,

so eventually they did do this. Now, these rules establish the role of common carriers, and again that concept dates back to the railroad days. Essentially, the rules said you could not establish different prices for different people, So you couldn't charge one group of people five dollars a ticket just because of who they were, and then a different group of people you would charge ten dollars a ticket or fifteen dollars a ticket just because of who they were.

Nor were you allowed to discriminate against people and refuse them service if they were following the rules and they had the money for a ticket. So if I show up to your train and I got five dollars in hand and I'm not outwardly breaking any rules, you would not be allowed to say, oh, no, I'm sorry, you can't ride this train. And the reason for that was because the railroads have been uh determined to be common carriers. They were too important for the good of the United

States to operate as completely private entities. The same thing is true for telecommunications, because you had all these different communications lines that were stretching from state to state, and you had state governments that were kind of getting into argument with one another, and the federal government stepped in and said, all right, here's the deal. You can't do this because it's too important to the health of the country.

So this was kind of another step on that on that pathway to classify Internet as that same sort of um experience or service. Basically, you have to play nice now putting bias operators under title to gave the FCC authority to enforce rules. They could actually enforce the stuff that they were creating. They could create rules and they can enforce them because Title to gives them that authority

as long as it's classified under titled too. Uh So that will allow them to get around those issues they had had earlier in net neutrality cases where the courts kept on saying, hey, you like totally don't have the authority to do that thing. By reclassifying bias companies as telecommunications companies, the FCC gained that authority over them. Now.

The first provision in the Open Internet or OR established that bias operators would not be allowed to block access to legal content, apps, services, or non harmful devices subject to reasonable network management. So an I s P like a T and T couldn't deny customers the ability to connect to a specific brand of laptop on their networks or block any specific content from a competitor because of this specific rule. The second provision stated that bias companies

couldn't throttle any content purposefully barring any network management issues. So, in other words, a T T couldn't say, all right, yeah, you can access that service that's on Comcasts network, but we're just gonna put the brakes on it. So that's really unpleasant and there's no incentive to use that service. That was against the rules according to the second provision, so it wouldn't allow a company to prioritize its own

services over that of others. The idea being that any consumer would have equal opportunity to use whichever service he or she preferred across the entirety of the Internet. It might be the same as their I s p s, or it might be someone else. The third provisions stated that bias operators couldn't operate with paid prioritization. So, in other words, you're not supposed to have like a super secret v I P line that people could pay to

use and get the fast track to consumers. And you may have heard some some talk about this particular one ideas like, you know, I run a ultra high definition streaming service, so I want to pay a little extra money to the I s p s to make sure that my traffic is going to consumers um in a in a fast lane. This is the big fast lane discussion. Now, this rule ends up being sidestepped by the content delivery

network issue I talked about earlier. If you build content delivery networks within I s p s, then you kind of end up not having to worry about this as much. But then only the the entities that have huge amounts of money can afford to do that in the first place. And unlike the other two rules, there's no exception here

for reasonable network management. So for the other two provisions, if you are needing to manage your network because of UH an imbalance in traffic, you are allowed to break those first two provisions, providing you can actually say I had to do it because otherwise our our network traffic would have been so great as to cause an overall collapse and that's a bad thing. The third provision, you couldn't even do that. There was no rule for that.

So on top of those provisions, the rules stated that biased companies couldn't quote unreasonably interfere with or unreasonably disadvantage customers abilities to select, access, and use lawful content services and devices. They also couldn't unreasonably interfere with or unreasonably disadvantage edge providers from making lawful content apps, services, or devices. So in other words, UH they couldn't couldn't meddle with either the content or the devices that were moving across

their individual networks. Now today is a very different world than the one in when the FCC passed those rules, and the current administration in the United States is looking to reverse those twenty fifteen decisions. That includes reclassifying biased companies again, this time removing them from the classification of telecommunications companies and thus pulling them out from under titled two.

This would put the Federal Federal Trade Commission, or f TC, in charge of overseeing claims of privacy violations or anti competitive practices among bias operators, so the FCC would no longer be in charge. Instead it would be the f t C. The critics of this move say that the FTC has very little power, is a small organization um and it isn't much of a check against bias operators. It doesn't really stand as a threat at all or

a measure to keep these companies behaving properly. For one thing, the FTC doesn't have the authority to set regulations, so they can't They can't make any rules. All they can do is go after companies if it becomes clear that those companies are not following their own terms of service. With customers. So if you if your I s P is A T and T and UH, you are upset

with how things are going. If the way A T and T is performing is not in direct violation of its terms of service, the FTC can't really do anything about on it. Because the FTC can't set up the rules. It gives a lot of power to the corporations. That's the complaint a lot of critics are having right now that they're saying this is a bad move because it's giving the people or the entities I should say that we're trying to make sure play by the rules, it's

giving them the ability to make up the rules. So there's no sense in the whole making sure they play by the rules. If you give the person the ability to write all the rules, of course they're playing by them because they're the ones defining the rules as they go along. It could be like an enormous game of calvin Ball. It's for the three Calvinant Hobbs fans that

are out there. All right, I got more to cover in the end of this episode, but before I get into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. According to the new chairman, of the f c C A Jeep Pie. The two thousand fifteen order quote put at risk online investment and innovation, threatening the very open internet it purported to preserve. Investment in broadband networks declined. Internet service providers have pulled back on plans to deploy

new and upgraded infrastructure and services to consumers. End quote. So Pie's argument is that because these regulations were in place, I s p s were disinclined. They had no incentive to invest in their own infrastructure. I mean, why would they they were being regulated. Now, I have to add that I failed to find a lot of research that actually substantiates this claim. For one thing, there's just a

lack of research all around. It's it's not that I'm finding conflicting reports, rather than there's just not a lot of definitive research to either support or refute it. According to I T Were World, in two thousand fifteen, broadband networks invested seventies six billion dollars in upgrading networks. Now, this was a slight decrease from two numbers, but it

wasn't a dramatic decline. In fact, was the highest total spit on infrastructure over the records of the Internet was the second highest, so it's not like numbers dropped precipitously. They dipped. So it's unclear if there really is a risk to investment and innovation. There might be, but we don't have enough information there. There's not enough data to show an actual trend yet. So I'm not saying the FCC chairman's conclusion is necessarily wrong. It could be right.

I'm just saying it's not supported by enough evidence to be a firm conclusion. It may well be that the Open Internet Order is doing exactly what PIE says it is doing, but it doesn't seem like we actually have the information to draw that conclusion yet. So what we really need is more research to see are these companies pulling back from investing in their infrastructure. Have they been given an incentive to not invest back in the infrastructure?

Is that actually harming consumers? We don't know. There's not been enough data yet. The proposal that PIE has drafted also says that the rules were established quote despite virtually no quantifiable evidence of consumer harm end quote. So here's PIE saying, look, you're these were rules that were looking

for a problem that didn't exist. So as a solution searching for a problem, and since there was no evidence of any consumers actually being harmed, then the rules aren't really protecting anybody, And that's that's an interesting argument to say, like, if there's nothing wrong happening, then why do we have to make regulation shans? Granted, if the regulations just exist but aren't forcing any ongoing expense from the government, you

might argue, well, where is the problem. If we've established the rules, if someone violates the rules, then we have we have something to go to. But you could also leave the argument of well, if no one's violating the rules, ever, why do we have the rules there? Um, I would counter that the decreased competition in the internet service provider market in the United States is pretty bad. This goes

all the way down to the consumer facing level. So we're talking like the backbone companies all the way down to the ones that we as customers individuals in the United States would use for our internet service provider. So for example, where I live, I have one choice if I want to have broadband speeds UH. The next fastest choice I would have at my my UH option is below broadbands beat if we define it at the current standard in the United States as twenty five megabits per second.

That's how the FCC defined it in So, if I look at my choice of Internet service providers, I only have one option if I want to hit broadband speeds. Everything else is sub broadband speed. That's it. That means one company has a monopoly on broadband speeds in my neighborhood, and that puts customers in my neighborhood and disadvantage. We

have no alternative. If our i SP chooses to engage and behavior we find unacceptable, we don't have another option to go to that can provide us at Internet access

at that same speed. We might choose to go with a slower speed, and which almost feels like we're punishing ourselves UH in order to not work with that i s P. But the ideal situation would to have would be to have a lot of competing Internet service providers with comparable capability of delivering fast Internet service to multiple customers. This would end up UH giving companies the incentive to innovate, to find ways to set themselves apart from their competitors

to attract more customers. That way, customers are the ones who benefit if there are no competitors, there's no incentive for a company to do that, and customers as a result often suffer because there's nowhere else to go. You've got one choice to go to. It's kind of like the old UH Soviet Union, where if you wanted a specific product, you had to go to one place and that was the one product you could get and there were no other alternatives. It's kind of like that UH

in that case. Of course, in the SO Union it was all state controlled, not corporate controlled, but otherwise it's very similar. Net neutrality and related policies are supposed to protect against this kind of behavior, particularly in a world where competition is scarce. Now, if we lived in a world where we did have that fierce competition among I s p s and markets across the world, it might

not even be an issue. That neutrality might not ever be talked about, because the market would end up demanding that the companies that that benefit consumers the most would be the most successful. That gives again those incentives to the other companies to follow suit. No one would be doing stupid stuff that that limited what their customers could do, because they would lose those customers. But that's not the

world we live in. I can't just switch from one to the other, and most people can't either because they don't have those options. There are too few I s p s, And we've seen numerous stories of how companies have tried to consolidate power even more through various mergers and acquisitions. Comcast was trying to buy Time Mourner for a while. That would have consolidated two massive internet service providers,

and that would have been even less competition in the marketplace. Now, the companies were saying this is gonna be great for consumers, but honestly, when you don't have a lot of competition, it's not that great for consumers because why why should there be. Your consumers aren't gonna go anywhere. They have no other place to go, So do what works best to maximize your profits and not worry so much about the consumer response. That's that's the real issue there. It's

pretty ugly. So what do I think is going to actually happen from all of this with the FCC moving in this direction. Well, I'm recording this in early May. It's gonna be mid May when the FCC starts to move on any sort of decisions, and uh, Meanwhile, we've got the case being pushed towards the Supreme Court to be heard. So we've got two different avenues of attack

against net neutrality. First, I think the Supreme Court will decline to hear the case brought against c f c C and it's classification of I s P S under Title two. I think that case is not going to make it all the way to the Supreme Court, and I think the reason for that is the Court's going to decline to hear the case because the f c C is already considering reclassifying uh I s p S

again and rolling those rules back. So I don't think the Supreme Court will hear the case because they're gonna see that this argument is essentially moot and there's no reason to to look at the case if the FCC is going to change the rules back anyway. So I suspect we will see regulations rolled back from I s P S. Deregulating is a frequent message from conservative governments.

I'm not optimistic about that helping out the average consumer that I have no trouble believing it will be a huge help to the enormous businesses that are I s P S now, if this happens, it will likely take some time, as just the process for making these rules is borious and typically involves inviting input from the general public, and the last time that happened, UH, the general public overwhelmed the FCCS systems with input largely in favor of

net neutrality, so we'll likely see a similar response, led by various entities on the Internet like the Electronic Frontier Foundation pushing for people to speak out in favor of net neutrality. I don't think it's going to ultimately matter in the long run. I think we're gonna see those regulations rolled back, at least to some extent, maybe not as far back as what people are proposing right now, but I don't think that I s p s will

be under titled to classification for much longer. Maybe a year, that's my guess. This could lead to another discussion about fast lanes ultimately down the line, but really, as I mentioned before, it really comes down to those content distribution networks.

The real fear is that big companies like Netflix, which have billions of dollars, will be able to flourish, while small competing companies that could potentially be of great interest to consumers can't get on that same page because they can't afford to essentially pay what amounts to a toll to internet access providers. Netflix can afford that, but a startup company that might be a huge hit if it had a chance, might not be able to ever get off the ground because it can't afford to play ball

the way the big companies can. Now, the big companies don't want to play ball. They they're also big companies. They don't they don't want to spend money they don't have to spend. So I don't wanna come out here saying like Netflix and Google and Amazon and Facebook, they're all the good guys and the I s p s are the bad guys. Uh. Really, these are all entities that are trying to minimize expenses and maximize profits as best they can, and ultimately, we're the consumers were the

ones who get squeezed by this from both sides. So don't take me the wrong way. I'm not trying to say that Netflix and Google and all those guys are are angels and the I s p s are devils. It's more like these are businesses. They have a purpose, and that purpose is to make money. Is not a moral judgment. It is just that's the purpose of a corporation is to make money, and we as consumers are

the ones affected by this. If we see a definitive ruling between the time I record this episode and the time it publishes, I'll be sure to jump back in the studio and record an update to this episode. And this is the part where it will go. It will go in this section or right after it. So if you don't hear an update after this paragraph, it's because nothing definitive has happened yet, or I forgot one of the two. One of the two things happen. So that's

it for this episode of Tech Stuff. Remember you can get in touch with me through email. Let me know of any suggestions you have for guests on the show for topics I might want to cover. For anything that you think deserves an update, like net neutrality. If there's another topic I've covered in the past that you field needs to have a little refresher, let me know. The address for our show is tech Stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can say hi through Twitter

or Facebook. The handle for the show at both of those is tech Stuff h s W. Remember you can tune in to watch me stream shows live on twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. Visit the site to see my schedule, and I'll talk to you guys again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com