I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving. We had a great time as always. Whereas for each of us there is a lot to be thankful for on the personal front, there is very little to be happy about in terms of what is happening around us in this country. One of the most disturbing topic (really mild in light of some of the other despicable news) is this administration’s resolve to revoke the net neutrality provisions that were passed in 2015. That in itself was a close call that many don’t seem to remember. I wrote about a court ruling that preceded FCC’s ruling in 2015 here. In short, the Federal Appeals Court’s rulings were based on the way the Internet Service Providers were classified and FCC basically reclassified the ISPs to make sure that the net neutrality can be imposed on them. The new chairman of the FCC wants to reverse them. This administration, whose only coherent message seems to be “reverse everything that the Obama administration did”, claims that deregulation is the key to innovation.

As I have expressed my feelings earlier, I think this is as terrible an idea as the trickle down economics. “Give the power/money in the hands of big corporations and they will take care of you”. I am sure you have been hearing about this from various communication channels during the past several days. This is worth reading – “The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death.”

Whenever I hear the FCC chairman Ajit Pai trying to explain why he wants to repeal net neutrality, I get the feeling that he is repeating the party line from the administration about why deregulation is a good thing, without clearly explaining why is deregulation is a good thing in this context.

This issue is so divisive and explosive that Ajit Pai’s home and family have become the targets for harassment, which is bad and I feel this is not how we should have debates in this country.

The core issue here is that removing net neutrality provision has the potential to create imbalances in internet service that favor the ISPs goals than the consumers. The administration argues that this will increase competition and therefore good for the consumer. In a piece titled “Why Ajit Pai’s decision killing Obama’s net neutrality FCC regulation is good”, Washington Examiner says “One reason is that the market will take care of wrongdoers. Comcast would lose Internet customers if, for example, it only allowed those customers to see MSNBC (Comcast’s sister company) for news.”

Sure, in Higganum, where I live, I have only one real choice for reliable internet and that is Comcast. Even if the majority of us in the town wanted to boycott Comcast for wrongdoing, we have no hope that another provider will magically emerge to serve a small community like ours because there is not a lot of money to be made. With the exception of major cities, most places in this country have a single ISP. If deregulation is likely to magically bring new options for these areas, they are most likely to happen with some strings attached – the ISPs wanting to control the content!

Cable companies have shown what happens when they have the content control – look at the bundling that happens in the cable TV land. Yes, I have 140 channels, 130 of which I just don’t watch or I don’t need. I pay a hefty price for these forced content. With the removal of the net neutrality provisions this is exactly where we will find ourselves – content providers with a lot of money will influence these ISPs to gain preferential access.

The same piece I referred to earlier from Washington Examiner says “Consider the possibility of Internet “fast lanes.” As telemedicine becomes an increasingly important part of healthcare, wouldn’t you want your surgeon to be able to buy access to an express lane in which a network was allowed to grant privilege to certain data over others? That is, AT&T should be allowed to provide a service in which data bytes flowing between an operating room and a surgeon take precedence over bytes of 100 dudes Googling to find out whether Jennifer Lawrence is married.” This is just pure nonsense. Hospitals and surgeons can do this more reliably by purchasing such fast lanes today and have a private network for this purpose! If the 100 dudes who are paying $150 a month each for bundled services with strings attached (such as landline phones) want to Google about Jennifer Lawrence, why not? Do we want the cable company to say “Oops… you can’t search for Jennifer Lawrence for the next 3 hours because of a very important surgery that needs to happen”…

It was refreshing to read a sound argument (instead of pure nonsense like the one above) from FCC Commissioner Clyburn which dubunks several claims from Ajit Pai in 2015.

With all the depressing things that are happening with this administration, I have lost hope that the net neutrality provision will prevail. Comcast has already removed the “no paid prioritization” pledge from its website, which hints that all of their lobbying efforts to remove net neutrality provisions are likely to pass! I am hopeful that the courts will save us from this madness, at least for a while!