Tim Wu

[Commentary] President Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, announced plans to eliminate net neutrality (technically, make it “voluntary”) despite its popularity, record of success and acceptance by most of the industry. His proposal is of dubious legality. But should it succeed, the only real winners will be the cable and phone industries, which will gain yet another way to raise prices for everyone.

The proposal is the epitome of senseless government action and sharply out of step with Trump’s populist mandate. Did Trump voters really vote for higher cable bills? In analyzing the attack on net neutrality, one looks in vain for the problem that needs to be fixed. Net neutrality refers to rules intended to ensure that broadband providers cannot block content or provide faster delivery to companies that pay more. The policy was put in place in the George W. Bush administration, where it enjoyed bipartisan support. In the years since, it has sheltered bloggers, nonprofit organizations like Wikipedia, smaller tech companies, TV and music streamers, and entrepreneurs from being throttled by providers like AT&T and Verizon that own the “pipes.” The idea of killing net neutrality certainly has nothing to do with voters or majority will. Instead, the proposal, like Pai’s earlier gutting of privacy protections for cable customers, is at war with the economic populism that voters claimed they wanted and that Mr. Trump promised.
[Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School]

[Commentary] In 2007, at a public forum at Coe College, in Iowa, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked about net neutrality. Specifically, “Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to reinstate net neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint Federal Communications Commissioners that support open Internet principles like net neutrality?” “The answer is yes,” President Obama replied. “I am a strong supporter of net neutrality.”

If reports in the Wall Street Journal are correct, President Barack Obama’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Thomas Wheeler, has proposed a new rule that is an explicit and blatant violation of this promise. In fact, it permits and encourages exactly what Obama warned against: broadband carriers acting as gatekeepers and charging Web sites a payola payment to reach customers through a “fast lane.”

FCC Chairman Wheeler released a statement accusing the Wall Street Journal of being “flat-out wrong.” Yet the Washington Post has confirmed that the new rule gives broadband providers “the ability to enter into individual negotiations with content providers … in a commercially reasonable matter.” That’s telecom-speak for payola payments, and a clear violation of President Obama’s promise.

This is what one might call a net-discrimination rule, and, if enacted, it will profoundly change the Internet as a platform for free speech and small-scale innovation. It threatens to make the Internet just like everything else in American society: unequal in a way that deeply threatens our long-term prosperity.

[Wu is professor at Columbia Law School]

[Commentary] Network neutrality has undoubtedly captured national attention. You’d be excused for wondering what all the fuss is about. Most people have a rough sense that net neutrality is about the rules for Internet traffic; but the precise debates about regulatory authority and the rules themselves are abstruse. Net neutrality has seized the moment because it is standing in for a national conversation about deeper values.

It is, among other things, a debate about opportunity -- or more precisely, the Internet as another name for it. As such, the mythology of the Internet is not dissimilar to that of America, or any open country -- as a place where anyone with passion or foolish optimism might speak his or her piece or open a business and see what happens. No success is guaranteed, but anyone gets to take a shot. That’s what free speech and a free market look like in practice rather than in theory.

The ideal of equality in the public sphere is another underlying theme in the current debate. While there’s always been some inequality, it is especially acute today. The prospect that the FCC might allow a “fast lane” for some traffic, leaving everyone else in a slower lane, has ignited the argument that private inequality must have its limits, and that some public spaces must remain open to all.

Apart from these abstract ideas, net neutrality is also standing in for a debate regarding the future of television, which is the most popular medium of our time. The clash between Comcast and Netflix over allegations of false congestion and the payment of extra fees is woven into the larger discussion. Comcast, of course, mainly represents what television is now, while Netflix represents what it is becoming.

[Commentary] Over the last 5 years, the Web has witnessed a dramatic degree of centralization and standardization. That mostly has made life simpler and easier. Heartbleed, the vulnerability in SSL encryption recently discovered, makes this clear, as did the National Security Agency spying revelations in June 2013.

Once upon a time, having an account compromised might only mean so much. But as we centralize more, and put more of our lives online and into consolidated accounts, the damage from being compromised is greater.

The standard advice is just to change your passwords more often. But what would actually make the web ecosystem less vulnerable is not just better security, but more diversity and more competition at every level, even among encryption standards.

As annoying as it may seem, we’re safer when we have more accounts, with different types of encryption, spread across multiple companies. Otherwise, as the analogy goes, if all the gold is stored at Fort Knox, a thief knows where to go.