 Well, despite that net neutrality is overwhelmingly popular among U.S. voters, Republican Democrat independent, even extremely anti-regulation libertarians I know are pro-title to net neutrality. The new FCC chairman is in the middle of trying to roll back current protections. Why would he do something so clearly against the will of the people? Well, he used to be a lawyer for Verizon, and Verizon is pushing for this real change. Maybe that's just a coincidence? But in this busy, frustrating, draining political climate, I want to make time for this thing that most Americans across the political spectrum agree on. First, let's review how we got here. So say your local mail delivery truck stops in front of your house, which is good because two days ago you ordered two different books with two-day shipping, sent out at the same time from similar locations, and you're pretty excited for them both. The delivery driver picks up your two packages and starts reading the labels. One is from a small independent bookstore they've never heard of. The other is from a large chain they've already delivered like 20 packages from today. Instead of just dropping them both off, the driver makes a phone call to the big bookseller and says, hey, I sure deliver a lot of your packages. The company replies, yeah, our customers really like our stuff. The driver says, I'm pretty sure your packages take up like 30% of the space in my truck. We're going to need to hire more trucks if you keep this up. The company says, wow, you must be so happy that our customers are paying you to deliver so many packages from us that you can expand your business. And the driver's like, right, look, I'm thinking I don't want to carry more than one package all this way to the customer's door. And there's this other package from another address for them. So I think I might just deliver that one. And the big company is like, what? The customer paid for two-day shipping from you. You can't just decide not to deliver it, what? Because we give you too much business? The deliverer says, relax, I'll deliver it eventually. Just might take a while, unless of course you'd like to help us out. Just a little extra shipping fee and we'll deliver your book on time. As the customer waiting for your books, what do you think you and the book company should do? Report the driver, no way what they're doing is legal. So you report them. But it turns out their lobbyists have convinced the government that what they're doing is okay. No, it's not just okay, it's innovation. Fine, maybe you can do capitalism to it. The big book chain starts using another delivery company, one that appreciates the amount of business they're getting from those deliveries. And of course, you'd rather pay for shipping from a company that actually follows through on their promises and new businesses grow. Hooray, that's how it should work, which is why a lot of people think that's how it does work. So you have a $100 a month contract with Comcast to deliver you whatever data you order at a certain speed. And you order data from Netflix and Netflix sends the data your way. But just before it gets to your house, it has to go through Cable's Comcast owns. And Comcast says, wow, Netflix, you give us so much business. Pay us money or we'll slow down your site until it's frustratingly unusable. Netflix should be able to say, yeah, no thanks. First of all, you're going to lose your customers if you don't give them the service they're paying for. And second, why wouldn't you want to lay down more cable and expand your business? Wouldn't that make you more money? It would make so much sense if Comcast's reply was, gee, Netflix, you're right. We don't want to lose customers. We want to lay more bigger cable, expand our business, and make more money. But as anyone who pays for their own internet and has tried comparison shopping knows, that's not how it works. Comcast can reply. First of all, we're not going to lose customers. What can they do? Move somewhere else that has cables laid down by one of our very good friends? Second of all, we don't need the business from delivering your content. We can already charge as much as we want. Look, this sucker is paying almost $100 a month for 10 megabytes a second on a good day. Third, Netflix competes with their own video content. If Netflix is unwatchably slow and people leave to watch cable TV, which we have conveniently packaged in with their internet service, that's a win-win. And both wins are for us. Fourth, when your site doesn't load, it may be our fault. But the customer doesn't see us artificially restricting the data they ordered. They see you being slow. So pay up. And Netflix did. This already happened. Truth is, there's a lot of homes and businesses where the local internet service provider has a monopoly. Capitalism does not work when monopolies block the way between producers and consumers. That's not rhetoric, it's math. Capitalism doesn't work when it's impossible for new businesses to emerge in a market. Look at how much trouble Google is having with Google Fiber and their Google. In many parts of the US, there's a good chance that Comcast is your only option. You'll pay for internet because you need internet. But you'll be paying three times as much as people are paying for the internet in Seoul or Tokyo. For service, that's 10 times slower. We're being artificially held back on purpose. When you order a book, the delivery truck drives on their own driveways, public roads, toll roads, the private lane that goes to the bookstore's warehouse, all the way to your street and outside your house. And then, in this allegory, you pay Comcast to hire a company to make and maintain a driveway so that the Comcast trucks can get from the road to your house. And because they built that driveway, only their trucks are allowed to use it. If you lived in Tokyo, you'd have a nice, wide, perfectly paved road, but Comcast made you a little dirt road full of potholes. You'd like Comcast to fix it, or to hire someone else to, but there's no one else to hire. So instead of fixing it, Comcast charges you even more and still doesn't fix it. Here's the officially proposed rule the FCC is considering. Internet service providers must offer some amount of access to all legal internet things, but they can offer a fast lane to certain content providers. This sounds like maybe Comcast and Netflix collaborate to put in a special cable all the way from Netflix right to your home to get super fast Netflix service, but that's not what this fast lane is. It's not even a nice new paved driveway. The fast lane means that Comcast puts a gate in front of your driveway. The Netflix trucks are allowed in right away because they paid off the gatekeeper. You invite your friend over and your friend has to wait outside the gate for a while, even when no one else is using your driveway. If you want to watch Netflix right now, yes, you should be able to prioritize Netflix's data and slow everything else down. But if after that you want to torrent the latest ViHeart video, there's no technical reason you shouldn't be able to put that in the fast lane. You're not paying your ISP for content, you're paying them to deliver the content you choose. Except they decided maybe they do want to control what content you can choose, and the FCC's proposed rule would make that officially okay, which is a huge reversal of the FCC's position that happened when Tom Wheeler, a formal cable lobbyist became chairman. In 2004, the FCC basically said, hey, ISPs, we made some network neutrality rules for you. Yay, open internet. And then Comcast started throttling BitTorrent, which was against those rules. There was a court case that Comcast won with the argument that the FCC couldn't legally enforce those rules because they weren't official enough. So the FCC created the open internet order of 2010 and voted on it and passed it, and finally net neutrality had real official rules. And Verizon took the FCC to court and was like, are you sure those rules are for us? Because they look a lot like the rules for common carriers, and we're not common carriers, so we're thinking those rules don't apply to us. And Verizon won. So if the FCC can't enforce their own rules because ISPs aren't classified as common carriers, a lot of people think that the FCC's next move should be to classify ISPs as common carriers. Basically, a common carrier can't discriminate among the things they carry. Airlines and telephone companies are common carriers, so Apple can't pay Virgin America to not let any Microsoft employees on their flights. T-Mobile can't purposely drop your call when you're trying to order a pizza if Domino's won't pay them a cut of the order. Up till recently, ISPs have been acting like common carriers. They built their businesses on customers' expectations that they were common carriers, like other telecommunication services. And with the benefit of the legal protection given to telecommunication services, such as not being liable for the content that moves through their cables. In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act thing happened, which gave ISPs more protection from liability for their users' actions, still back when ISPs acted as if they were common carriers. Right now, ISPs control content without being liable for that content. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped ISPs become big and powerful. They merged and formed monopolies, and then they decided it was in their best interest not to be considered a telecommunication service, but an information service, which would be less regulated. And also have fewer protections, but since they were now protected by the DMCA, that wasn't a problem. There were a bunch of hearings. They won, they lost, and then in 2005 they managed to convince six out of nine judges that even though the internet is a telecommunication service, they also do other things. And the Telecommunications Act that would have classified them as a common carrier telecommunication service does not clearly state that they have to be classified that way even if they do other things. So the obvious response would be to make them officially and explicitly classified as title to common carriers, and in 2014 the internet came together and with massive effort convinced the FCC to indeed classify them that way, which went through in 2015. Great. Except now it's 2017 and the government is fixated on undoing things rather than doing things, and a former Verizon lawyer is in charge. Also since 2014, Verizon acquired AOL and Yahoo, which includes Tumblr, so without net neutrality, Verizon could do innovative things like prioritize AOL, email, Yahoo searches, and Tumblr social networking while making their competitors unusually slow or charging them a hefty fee. Maybe there's a hypothetical world in which marketplace competition economics allows consumer choice to move ISPs in a positive, innovative direction, but we're in a world that has just a few telecom giants, and we know the history of their actions. These big ISPs didn't create any of the innovations that made the internet the invaluable public resources it's become. The internet was invented by government-funded research, not ISPs. It proliferated through university networks, not ISPs. ISPs grew from regulated title to telecom services with regulated infrastructure, because you can't just let everyone run their own cable down the street, beam whatever frequencies they want from their rooftops and send communication satellites into space. Some would say those rules impose on our freedom, and it's true, civilization means giving up some freedoms in pursuit of more fundamental freedom and equality. When a company profits from making use of our common resources, it's okay to demand they use them fairly. And the beautiful thing is that most people agree. It's an action we can take together for each other without hurting anyone or making sacrifices. So let's start with this and see how it feels.