What the Food Babe debacle tells us about net neutrality

[Commentary] Vani Hari (“The Food Babe”), the author of best-selling “The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days!” found herself at the center of a controversy when she was attacked by chemist Yvette d’Entremont, (“The Science Babe”) for making sensationalistic and harmful claims. Since neither blogger is a nutritional biochemist, the relevant discipline for evaluating diet and health, their spat is little more than a spectacle that provides more insight into the nature of social media pressure than nutrition. The Food Babe equivalents that pressured the White House and the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a blanket ban on the scary-sounding “paid prioritization” technique have succeeded in making Internet policy less factual and less rational than it needs to be.

As the Internet expands into new application areas such as the Internet of Things and into providing service to new users, network service providers need flexibility. In general, the FCC outsourced its analysis of this subtle point (and of many others) to commenters who failed to offer factually correct criticism and who probably lack the technical skill to do so. So we’re now in a position where we have to address blanket bans on potentially useful practices when we should be examining rational limits. I don’t blame the alarmed citizens who pressure regulators to act according to their sincerely held beliefs; in a republic founded on respect for public participation and free speech, we shouldn’t fear the input of ordinary citizens. But we do have to recognize that facts need to trump emotion in matters of public policy. By caving to poorly based opinion, the FCC failed to seize a “teachable moment” that would have paid dividends in future Internet policy discussions. I suspect this happened because FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his White House counterparts failed to grasp the technical issues.