callan \ blog
april 15, 2017
In Walt Mossberg's column for The Verge this week, he sketches out the beginnings of a plan to restructure the way the internet is governed, making the case that it's critically different from any communications technology (or, well, any anything) that came before it and needs more adjudication and protection than what the FCC and FTC can offer. While it's possible to make the case that the telephone system and network television also paved the way for a new era of business and innovation, the internet is critical infrastructure for day-to-day existence in 2017. Not only does it serve as the communications platform du jour, it also provides many workers access to the tools they need to be able to do their jobs. Commerce, art, education, research, civic life, and news all make their way to us online. It's hard to imagine what would be left, economically speaking, if it suddenly went away.
Mossberg writes, "Every few years, the feds and the courts change direction or fail to answer important questions. And every day, the internet becomes more of a platform for lousy ads, for increasing the power of a few rich companies, and for intrusive tracking. It’s too important to leave unprotected." The House of Representatives' decision to repeal FCC privacy rules that would've barred ISPs from sharing personal web histories and using subscriber data for marketing is just the most recent example of what insufficient protection and governance can lead to. It's bad enough imagining the custom-tailored ad-driven layer of hell that'll likely be applied like shrinkwrap to our online activities because the carriers want to make even more money. It gets worse when you consider there's nothing stopping a direct tie to the name and address on your Comcast account and every last thing you do online.
So, yes: we need something more than the FCC to make sure the bedrock of the economy doesn't rot into something unrecognizable and unusable, that supermonopolies don't keep carving off little chunks of policy to reshape in a way that makes them richer and drives their captive audience insane. It also makes much more sense to have a standing board of decision makers who both understand the technology and the ramifications of policies, rather than leaving these conversations up to elected officials who are often at or below the "series of tubes" level of knowing what they're talking about. Mossberg said on a recent podcast that the best thing to do here is to rip it up and start again, to stop trying to adjudicate the internet from the perspective of rules that were established decades ago. There's precedent for doing things his way, like the establishment of special courts and the safeguards for national parks. But it'd be best to examine the current landscape and acknowledge just how exceptional and essential the internet has proven to be, and craft a strategy for maintaining it with that all in mind.
Taking this one step further, a special distinction like this could protect the internet's (presumably tentative) status as a common carrier. That means efforts for equitable access like the Appalachian Regional Commission's project to bolster broadband in underserved rural areas might avoid the budgetary hacksaw; they could expand and meaningfully take a crack at closing the digital divide. This isn't to dismiss the FCC's role in trying to address access issues throughout the past few years, but it could depoliticize the conversation or at least help it seem more infrastructural. Regardless of their politics, just about everybody can agree a shitty highway system would make freight deliveries difficult or impossible. It's not a handout to make sure people in flyover country have reliable broadband, just like paving a massive pothole on an interstate isn't a handout to truck drivers.
To stick with the highway metaphor, we need some new kind of authority to make sure every mile isn't so clogged with billboards that we can't focus on the road and that as we drive, we're not being followed and harangued by the builders of those billboards. We need to know the bridges are all built, that there aren't huge gaps that prevent people from participating in critical chunks of society. With an agency or other body committed to thinking through policies to protect and improve the internet, rather than successive FCC chairs undoing their predecessors' work or the government running potential progress around in pointless circles, we just might be able to swing it.
