Wisconsin Republican senator Ron Johnson threw his crazy hat into the ring on the issue of net neutrality yesterday. During an FCC oversight hearing, Sen. Johnson, piggybacking on Texas’s biggest pig Sen. Ted Cruz, said he supported rescinding net neutrality rules put into place under the Obama administration. Talking with FCC chair Ajit Pai, Sen. Johnson explained that he had come up with an analogy.
Johnson: Let’s say a group of neighbors want to build a bridge over a creek so they can cross over and talk to each other a lot, so it’s really for a neighborhood, maybe a dozen people. But then they find out that the local government is going to require that that bridge is open to the entire community of a million people, no prioritization whatsoever. They don’t get to cross first to go see their neighbor. A million people can come onto their property, ruin their lawns, and walk over that bridge.
Isn’t that kind of a similar analogy, is that a pretty good analogy in terms of what net neutrality is all about, not allowing for example a company that is going to invest billions of dollars in the pipeline, not allow them to sell a prioritized lane, for, I don’t know, doctors who want to prioritize distant diagnostics? They’re going to have to share that same pipeline, no prioritization, with for example people streaming illegal content or pornography? Tell me where that analogy is maybe not accurate.
Nope. It’s not like that at all. Watching aging U.S. senators try to talk about the internet and net neutrality is a lot like watching a dumb white rich guy tell you he’s a “regular Joe”—it’s equal parts condescending and infuriating. But for a telecom lackey like Ajit Pai, who has already expressed to everyone that he thinks the former FCC chair Tom Wheeler’s net neutrality rules failed, any dumb thing that came out of these Republican senators’ mouths was going to be “rightish.”
Pai: Senator, you’ve put your finger on one of the core concerns, which is that all of us favor a free and open internet where consumers can access lawful content of their choice, we also want to incentivize the construction of these networks which requires massive capital expenditures … our goal is obviously to make sure, to use your analogy, those bridges continue to be built, continue to be maintained and upgraded as traffic modernizes over time.
Johnson: In my example, I don’t think too many neighbors would chip in the money to build that bridge when they realize we’re not ever gonna be able to use it.
Pai: Right.
Johnson: Or certainly not priority on it.
It seems as if Sen. Johnson decided to take the infamous Sen. Ted Stevens’“series of tubes” idea and just take the top off the tube and make it a bridge! Considering the Pai and other Republicans clearly against doing anything to close the economic digital divide in this country, the best way to explain what conservatives and telecoms like Pai want is this: you have to pay more for your internet and unless you’re wealthy, the speed and amount of information you can have access to will be limited. Besides the fact that the FCC’s net neutrality rules don’t stop internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking “illegal” content, creating a system where there would be “paid-prioritizing” of internet access and speed would definitely not ensure that telemedicine would be able to outspend porn.
Perhaps more importantly, there is a way for telemedicine offerings to get paid prioritization under the FCC’s existing rules. The FCC distinguishes between “Broadband Internet Access Service (BIAS),” the usual type in which all Internet content shares the same network capacity and “Non-BIAS data services,” which are given isolated capacity to ensure greater speed and reliability. VoIP phone offerings, heart monitors, and energy consumption sensors qualify for this category, which is exempt from net neutrality rules. Telemedicine (another word for remote medical diagnosis) can also be exempt if it’s delivered over the network in the same way.
“We note that telemedicine services might alternatively be structured as ‘non-BIAS data services,’ which are beyond the reach of the open Internet rules,” the FCC’s net neutrality order said. The FCC reserved the right to scrutinize non-BIAS services to ensure that they don't harm competition, but the specific reference to telemedicine indicates that the FCC would not oppose isolated network capacity for remote medical diagnosis. The FCC did not provide any similar allowance for pornography.
Finally, when you have companies like Comcast telling you that net neutrality has has no real negative impact on companies like Comcast, the idea that net neutrality has “failed,” as Ajit Pai asserts, is just a lie. Here’s Comcast’s Chief Financial Officer Mike Cavanaugh talking about the impact of basic net neutrality protections.
“If you saw Title II go away or the reclassification undone,” the analyst asked, “would that be a meaningful change or meaningful benefit for Comcast?”
Cavanaugh’s answer? Basically, it doesn’t matter.
“I think in terms of what actually happens,” Cavanaugh said, “it’s the fear of what Title II could have meant, more than what it actually did mean.”
So, “we were afraid,” but in the end it was nothing. Okay. Got it. Senator Ron Johnson and Ajit Pai have another Republican bridge they want to sell you.