Jeff Gelles: Blowing past the Net neutrality smog

Michael Copps objected strongly a dozen years ago when then-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell took what he considered a big wrong turn: classifying cable companies' broadband Internet business as a lightly regulated "information service."

Copps will be back Thursday, watching from the audience as the FCC comes full circle and embraces the logic of his 2002 dissent. If Powell's successor, Tom Wheeler, draws the expected votes of his two fellow Democrats, the agency will reclassify all types of broadband as "Title II" telecommunications services - a move Wheeler and Copps both call necessary to keep the Internet functioning as it mostly does today and, more important, as nearly everybody says it should.

Now a special adviser to Common Cause, Copps has watched critics counter Wheeler's plans with scare language, calling Title II a "nuclear option" or warning that he wants to "regulate the Internet" and impose billions of dollars in new taxes - claims Copps calls "smog guns" used to cloud the debate.

Here are three of the smoggier myths about what the FCC calls "open Internet" rules and the wonkosphere calls "Net neutrality." Some, sad to say, are promulgated by journalists and bloggers who should know better:

Network owners will lose all ability to manage data. Even the normally reliable Vox.com bought into this simplistic formulation, with a headline this week defining Net neutrality as the idea that Internet service providers "should treat all Internet traffic equally."

That raises alarm among people who say things like "What about real-time medical data?" or "Can't they prioritize live phone conversations over text or streaming video?" And it's just plain wrong.

Neutrality "is most explicitly not about treating 'all bits the same,' " says Public Knowledge senior vice president Harold Feld. It's about barring ISPs from discriminating based on the bits' source or content - so that Comcast, say, can't demand a special fee from Netflix to deliver video to your TV, or make its own Streampix service work better than Netflix's.

More important, it's about the future of innovation - the next inventions that require data to flow freely across the Net, without roadblocks or toll-takers.

This is new "utility-style" regulation that will change the Internet. Neutrality is simply another term for the "common carrier" rules that, as Copps points out, governed the Net during the 1990s tech boom and before, when Title II phone companies and third parties like Earthlink used phone networks to offer public access to the Internet. That only changed when Powell, believing it would spur widespread competition and investment, embraced deregulation.

In the years since, network owners - almost all cable or phone companies with little or no competition - have occasionally blocked or throttled competitive services or content, such as Internet phone services, Netflix movies, or Skype calls. Public attention has generally forced them to back down.

It's true that in the days of Ma Bell, phone companies were regulated as monopoly utilities. But Wheeler plans the kind of Title II framework for broadband that governs cellphone calls - regulation that clearly hasn't stifled competition and investment.

Title II will bring "regulatory uncertainty." This is a bizarre claim, after years of uncertainty brought on by Powell's deregulation. Federal appeals courts have twice ruled that unless it relies on Title II, the FCC can't enforce the open Internet rules it has sought. Wheeler's move will undoubtedly be challenged, but so would any alternative.

Copps rejects the notion that imposing neutrality via Title II is about partisan politics, even as its foes turn to a GOP-run Congress for relief.

"We have this new communications system," he says. "The question is: Are we going to allow it to do what it's capable of doing, or are we going to allow a few special interests to use it for their own purposes and profit?"

Copps sees the answer in the FCC's shift - a belated victory of people over politically powerful network owners that run an increasingly essential service. For that reason alone, they demand stronger public oversight.