Will Title II go global?

[Commentary] Now that the Federal Communications Commission has reclassified Internet service as a telecommunications utility, advocates of reclassification see an opportunity to spread the FCC’s error world-wide. Their window of opportunity is short: the DC Circuit Court will hear oral arguments on the challenge to reclassification in December, and will probably rule within a few months of the hearing. One of the best ways to prevent the court from overturning the FCC’s decision would be for a substantial number of other countries to follow suit. The court doesn’t take its guidance from Europe, Asia, or South America, but a substantial bandwagon probably wouldn’t go wholly unnoticed. So it comes as no surprise that one of America’s foremost net neutrality advocates, Ben Scott, is now in Europe pressuring the European Commission to follow the lead of the FCC.

Scott, the former head of Free Press and most recently a State Department policy analyst, works for a German think tank known as “stiftung neue verantwortung,” which roughly translates as “new responsibility foundation” (the lower case is theirs.) Along with colleagues Stefan Heumann and Jan-Peter Kleinhans, Scott has penned a piece of very slick analysis titled “Landmark EU and US Net Neutrality Decisions: How Might Pending Decisions Impact Internet Fragmentation?” for European consumption. The fact that the US has effectively put the brakes on innovation in large swaths of our Internet ecosystem does not mean that the Europeans need to make the same mistake. The emerging Internet of Things will require some forms of priority treatment at least some of the time, so a large-scale ban of this practice isn’t genuinely helpful to IoT developers. The Internet is not at all obsessive about uniformity and homogeneity; it’s more French than German in its design priorities. The Internet is a “network of networks” that’s perfectly happy to operate differently over wireless connections compared to wired ones, and over fiber cables as compared to copper ones. It’s meant to be all things to all people, after all. So no, there’s no good reason to compromise the Internet’s design in the name of conformity to error. Here’s to hoping European regulators reject Scott’s proposal.

[Richard Bennett was the vice-chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association]