Opposition to net-neutrality protections shows network owners' hypocrisy

Before driving to work one day last week, I opened Google Maps on my iPhone to check alternate routes. Recently updated, the app requested personal information - my home and work addresses - before warning me about traffic congestion on the Schuylkill Expressway.

I didn't need to scour its privacy policy to know the deal. The addresses would make the app a bit more useful, but they were also something Google wanted for its own purposes. The Internet is full of such basic and open quid pro quos that link "edge providers" at one end with consumers like me at the other.

But what about the companies in the middle - especially the handful of big network owners, such as Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast, that handle consumers' Internet traffic, often for fees topping $50 or $100 a month?

Amazingly, they seem to believe they should be left alone to do most anything they want - as illustrated by reports that Verizon Wireless has quietly been tracking subscribers' Web browsing with "perma-cookies" that, unlike their ordinary-cookie counterparts, can't be blocked or cleared. Unlike my deal with Google, which I could accept or resist, Verizon expects its customers to just say yes.

That's only the latest incident to raise a red flag as network owners line up, yet again, to block the strong network-neutrality protections millions of Americans have demanded. Another example is the recent slowing of data flowing from Netflix to customers who simply want to use the bandwidth they've paid for to watch Netflix's TV shows and movies - video that (surprise!) competes with video sold by the network owners.

Yup, "net neutrality" is back in the news, like some policy wonk's strange remake of Groundhog Day. Once again, it's up to the Federal Communications Commission and courts to play out the ending. But this time there's a ray of hope we won't just relive the same, foolhardy process, where the FCC tries to please everybody and leaves us unprotected back at square one.

Last week, President Obama delivered his strongest call ever for a policy he backed as a candidate in 2008. He not only called on the FCC to adopt rules against blocking, slowing, or favoring certain providers' data - often referred to as creating Internet "slow lanes" and "fast lanes." He also urged the FCC to take a step it has balked at repeatedly: Declare Internet service to be a "telecommunications service" under the law the agency has enforced for the last 80 years.

To Harold Feld, senior vice president of Public Knowledge, that reclassification, known as "Title II" regulation, was always a no-brainer - even if it has also seemed a nonstarter politically since former FCC Chairman Michael F. Powell steered the agency toward "light touch" regulation a decade ago.

Advocates such as Feld have had an unusual range of allies over the years, including the Christian Coalition and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who dissented from the landmark 2005 Brand X ruling that upheld Powell's position that cable broadband was a Title I "information service." Scalia likened that to a pizza parlor's claiming it didn't offer delivery, just a "pizza-at-home" service that happened to include it.

Strip away a decade of back-and-forth between the FCC, network owners, and the courts, and here's what's left: Cable and phone firms want the lightest rules possible - and not a hint of price oversight, even if Internet service, like cable TV, is a rarity in technology, where other prices tend to fall as products improve.

Feld says fear of broadband price regulation is overblown - it's easy for the FCC to limit its Title II enforcement.

But Title II has other benefits. Those Verizon "perma-cookies," which the Electronic Frontier Foundation says enable "third-party advertisers and websites to assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors' web browsing habits without their consent"? Feld says, "They would be illegal three different ways - they would never dream of this under Title II."

Just like phone service, broadband is too important - it's the essential telecommunications service of the 21st century - to entrust only to network owners. The FCC has taken much too long to recognize that.