The Death of Net Neutrality?
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Transcript
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: This week, the FCC dealt what many have called the final death blow to network neutrality, the principle that all content, whether it comes from Netflix or a scrappy new tech startup, should be treated equally on the internet. On Thursday, the FCC announced that it would consider a new draft of the Open Internet or Net Neutrality rules that would allow internet services to pay broadband carriers for better access.
What does this mean and why does it matter? Most importantly, how might this affect your movie watching?
Siva Vaidhyanathan, chair of the Media Studies Department at the University of Virginia, isn’t buying FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s rationale that reports of net neutrality’s death are, quote, “flat out wrong.”
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think Chairman Wheeler is being disingenuous, at best. The rules that he’s proposing would create two lanes, two tiers of internet service. Either you're going to be in the fast lane where you pay a tremendous amount to get your content to people or you’re going to be in the slow lane because you're not willing to pay that extortion fee, and you better hope that your video comes over ungarbled.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Vaidhyanathan says no matter how Wheeler spins it, the government is giving big cable a license for blackmail.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: What we're seeing now is the capitulation to the political power of Comcast. Comcast is metastasizing. It’s picking up other major providers. It's about the have a merger with Time Warner Cable. It now owns all of the NBC properties and all of that content, including the Olympics. That's a tremendous amount of not only cultural power but political power. So what you’re actually seeing here through the FCC is a recognition that Comcast is too big to mess with.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: The FCC chairman is a former cable lobbyist, correct? So are you tying a direct link here between him and Comcast and net neutrality, and essentially Washington?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think everyone who works at the FCC right now, top to bottom, staff and commissioners, are sincerely committed to having the best possible open internet rules. The political realities in Washington DC are not letting them accomplish what they want. This is more surrender than corruption.
The basic fact is that by creating this two-tiered system and charging these companies a premium to have their video delivered at a high rate, you’re basically locking out any newcomers to the market. And so, we’re not gonna see the next Skype, the next YouTube, the next Netflix anytime soon.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: The proposal says that broadband providers would be required to act in what they call, quote, “a commercially reasonable manner.” So startups could technically appeal to the FCC on those grounds, right? I mean, what does “commercially reasonable” mean?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Nobody knows what “commercially reasonable” means, right? We, we have to assume that that means there can't be behavior that locks out legitimate competitors based on price discrimination, for instance, or anything else that would be an automatic flag of antitrust law. But, you know, that reasonableness standard is not something that an entrepreneur is gonna want to bet on. It's not something that an investor or a venture capital firm is gonna want to bet on. You’re basically taking a lot of the confidence out of the system, when it comes to invention and investment.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Back in February, we heard that Netflix made a deal with Comcast to get put on the fast lane. Are they sort of willing players in this discussion or do they just feel like, you know what, we have no choice here?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I feel sorry for them. Netflix really needs to be in the good graces of Comcast, Netflix very much needs to be able to arrive in our homes in a strong and viable form so that people don't give up on Netflix. And, in the absence of network neutrality, Comcast has no reason to be nice to Netflix.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I mean, really, should we feel sorry for Netflix, though? Shouldn’t we be asking them to stand up for us, the consumer, because they are the ones that we want? A lot of people don't care how they get their internet service. They just want the content. Isn't this a sort of key moment that potentially we, the consumer, can stand tall with our content providers and say, no, this is important, we want to be able to get it and we don’t want to be bullied?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: We used to be able to depend on other big countervailing forces to protect network neutrality. We used to be able to depend on Google and Facebook and Amazon, because there was a time not long ago when those companies saw as their present and their future the old-fashioned internet as their outlet. That's how they got to us. None of those companies take seriously that cord coming out of our walls anymore. Those companies have all bet on a very different set of arrangements, one that involves other proprietary distribution networks delivering mobile signals and delivering their content through, through our mobile devices.
But they’re also counting on, eventually, being able to link together all the different devices and platforms in our lives. They're looking forward to data flowing through our eyeglasses and our automobiles and our coffee makers and our fridges. They’re all trying to be the master of the operating system of our entire lives. They’re not so worried about video streaming, per say.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: You know, I've covered a lot of community broadband networks, mesh networks. Google Fiber grows into dozens of cities or it's coming into dozens of cities in the US. Are these a possible workaround? [LAUGHS] If you can’t beat ‘em, sort of just pretend they’re not there? Is that a possibility, municipal broadband?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Municipal broadband offers us great opportunity to make up for Comcast. Unfortunately, municipal broadband is really hard to execute. The city of Philadelphia tried it a number of years ago. Unfortunately, that's were Comcast lives too, and the government of Pennsylvania decided that cities in Pennsylvania should not be able to compete directly with Comcast. So that was a dream that never happened.
With Google Fiber, Google is proving to the world that you can have insanely fast broadband connection with super-high quality signals, video and otherwise, at low cost, with network neutrality.
Now, does that mean that we should depend on Google to roll that out in American cities over the next ten years? It depends on whether ultimately Google finds this in their interest, and I don’t have a lot of hope that Google wants it to be anything more than an experiment or a demonstration of what could happen. What we really need is policy in the public interest, policy shaped toward the future, based on a commitment to competition and creativity. We've been attacking these issues in piecemeal fashion, and it's been something close to a disaster over the past decade.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Siva, thank you so much.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: My pleasure.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Siva Vaidhyanathan is the chair of the Media Studies Department at the University of Virginia and the author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry).
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: This week, the FCC dealt what many have called the final death blow to network neutrality, the principle that all content, whether it comes from Netflix or a scrappy new tech startup, should be treated equally on the internet. On Thursday, the FCC announced that it would consider a new draft of the Open Internet or Net Neutrality rules that would allow internet services to pay broadband carriers for better access.
What does this mean and why does it matter? Most importantly, how might this affect your movie watching?
Siva Vaidhyanathan, chair of the Media Studies Department at the University of Virginia, isn’t buying FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s rationale that reports of net neutrality’s death are, quote, “flat out wrong.”
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think Chairman Wheeler is being disingenuous, at best. The rules that he’s proposing would create two lanes, two tiers of internet service. Either you're going to be in the fast lane where you pay a tremendous amount to get your content to people or you’re going to be in the slow lane because you're not willing to pay that extortion fee, and you better hope that your video comes over ungarbled.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Vaidhyanathan says no matter how Wheeler spins it, the government is giving big cable a license for blackmail.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: What we're seeing now is the capitulation to the political power of Comcast. Comcast is metastasizing. It’s picking up other major providers. It's about the have a merger with Time Warner Cable. It now owns all of the NBC properties and all of that content, including the Olympics. That's a tremendous amount of not only cultural power but political power. So what you’re actually seeing here through the FCC is a recognition that Comcast is too big to mess with.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: The FCC chairman is a former cable lobbyist, correct? So are you tying a direct link here between him and Comcast and net neutrality, and essentially Washington?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think everyone who works at the FCC right now, top to bottom, staff and commissioners, are sincerely committed to having the best possible open internet rules. The political realities in Washington DC are not letting them accomplish what they want. This is more surrender than corruption.
The basic fact is that by creating this two-tiered system and charging these companies a premium to have their video delivered at a high rate, you’re basically locking out any newcomers to the market. And so, we’re not gonna see the next Skype, the next YouTube, the next Netflix anytime soon.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: The proposal says that broadband providers would be required to act in what they call, quote, “a commercially reasonable manner.” So startups could technically appeal to the FCC on those grounds, right? I mean, what does “commercially reasonable” mean?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Nobody knows what “commercially reasonable” means, right? We, we have to assume that that means there can't be behavior that locks out legitimate competitors based on price discrimination, for instance, or anything else that would be an automatic flag of antitrust law. But, you know, that reasonableness standard is not something that an entrepreneur is gonna want to bet on. It's not something that an investor or a venture capital firm is gonna want to bet on. You’re basically taking a lot of the confidence out of the system, when it comes to invention and investment.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Back in February, we heard that Netflix made a deal with Comcast to get put on the fast lane. Are they sort of willing players in this discussion or do they just feel like, you know what, we have no choice here?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I feel sorry for them. Netflix really needs to be in the good graces of Comcast, Netflix very much needs to be able to arrive in our homes in a strong and viable form so that people don't give up on Netflix. And, in the absence of network neutrality, Comcast has no reason to be nice to Netflix.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I mean, really, should we feel sorry for Netflix, though? Shouldn’t we be asking them to stand up for us, the consumer, because they are the ones that we want? A lot of people don't care how they get their internet service. They just want the content. Isn't this a sort of key moment that potentially we, the consumer, can stand tall with our content providers and say, no, this is important, we want to be able to get it and we don’t want to be bullied?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: We used to be able to depend on other big countervailing forces to protect network neutrality. We used to be able to depend on Google and Facebook and Amazon, because there was a time not long ago when those companies saw as their present and their future the old-fashioned internet as their outlet. That's how they got to us. None of those companies take seriously that cord coming out of our walls anymore. Those companies have all bet on a very different set of arrangements, one that involves other proprietary distribution networks delivering mobile signals and delivering their content through, through our mobile devices.
But they’re also counting on, eventually, being able to link together all the different devices and platforms in our lives. They're looking forward to data flowing through our eyeglasses and our automobiles and our coffee makers and our fridges. They’re all trying to be the master of the operating system of our entire lives. They’re not so worried about video streaming, per say.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: You know, I've covered a lot of community broadband networks, mesh networks. Google Fiber grows into dozens of cities or it's coming into dozens of cities in the US. Are these a possible workaround? [LAUGHS] If you can’t beat ‘em, sort of just pretend they’re not there? Is that a possibility, municipal broadband?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Municipal broadband offers us great opportunity to make up for Comcast. Unfortunately, municipal broadband is really hard to execute. The city of Philadelphia tried it a number of years ago. Unfortunately, that's were Comcast lives too, and the government of Pennsylvania decided that cities in Pennsylvania should not be able to compete directly with Comcast. So that was a dream that never happened.
With Google Fiber, Google is proving to the world that you can have insanely fast broadband connection with super-high quality signals, video and otherwise, at low cost, with network neutrality.
Now, does that mean that we should depend on Google to roll that out in American cities over the next ten years? It depends on whether ultimately Google finds this in their interest, and I don’t have a lot of hope that Google wants it to be anything more than an experiment or a demonstration of what could happen. What we really need is policy in the public interest, policy shaped toward the future, based on a commitment to competition and creativity. We've been attacking these issues in piecemeal fashion, and it's been something close to a disaster over the past decade.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Siva, thank you so much.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: My pleasure.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Siva Vaidhyanathan is the chair of the Media Studies Department at the University of Virginia and the author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry).
Hosted by Manoush Zomorodi
Produced by WNYC Studios