‘Net neutrality’ good policy for everyone
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Article RatingBack in 1933, Congress passed a Communications Act in response to the growth of radio, telegraph and telephone usage.
Today, telegraph is no longer considered a mass communications medium, television has taken over from radio as the predominant carrier of entertainment, and today’s usage of radios and telephones is far beyond anything legislators could have imagined at the time.
As we grapple with issues relating to today’s mass communications media, it’s interesting that the issues aren’t a lot different and yet we seem to be rearguing the same points our great-grandparents did back then.
This week, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of a congressional subcommittee on telecommunications, proposed a bill to promote the principle of “net neutrality.” Markey’s initiative comes in response to news stories about issues raised by recent actions taken or proposed by telecom companies.
The cable TV provider Comcast, for example, has been interfering with its Internet customers’ use of file-sharing applications, in which users contact each others’ computers directly rather than send files to a third computer in between. Comcast never told its users it was doing this; an Associated Press story reported the firm’s actions.
And recently AT&T announced plans to begin screening its Internet data streams to see if any files its users were exchanging violated copyright laws.
Markey’s bill would also prevent firms from creating “tiered” Internet service, in which individual Internet companies would get preferential access to the Internet by paying more money. The existing Internet infrastructure is designed to treat all data equally, and a spokesperson for Markey said the online world has grown and flourished under that model - a good reason to keep it as a bedrock broadband policy.
You only have to go back to the original Communications Act to find that it asserts similar policy goals. In particular, it exempts telecom companies from responsibility for the contents of any messages carried on their lines.
At the time, there was some concern that if two people planned an illegal act via telephone, the victim might sue the phone company as an accessory to the crime.
One doesn’t need a Walt Disney level of imagination to see what the implications are in the modern era. The neutral carrier model as laid out in the 1933 Communications Act means telecom firms need not obtain character references for all their customers. But once they take proactive measures against one form of illegal behavior on their networks, they’re essentially taking responsibility for all wrongdoing by their users.
And that opens the door to lawsuits from users who fell for the often e-mailed Nigerian money-laundering scam, or were hit by computer viruses and spyware on their networks, or were defrauded by an online merchant.
We’d say the telecom companies are making a mistake by turning what is essentially a business problem of traffic vs. capacity into a policy issue that has the potential to create even bigger problems down the line.
