The year in net neutrality

[Commentary] Network neutrality was obviously the biggest tech policy issue of 2015 for those of us who work in the Internet and communication space. The first bombshell dropped on February 26th, when the Federal Communications Commission passed its third net neutrality order in a 3 – 2 party line vote. While net neutrality is an election issue, it’s clearly overshadowed by concerns about security and privacy on the Internet. Candidates are spending more time on encryption than on net neutrality, in part because it’s easier to understand and in part because it has a nexus with terrorist attacks. Democrats’ desire to make net neutrality a campaign issue is probably going to backfire on them because of the role encryption is playing in the debates. Secretary Clinton and celebrity Trump propose a “Manhattan Project” staffed by smart people in Silicon Valley to break the encryption used by terrorists, overlooking the fact that weakening encryption harms legitimate Internet users more than terrorists.

It’s entirely possible that the effects of the FCC’s rash action in Internet regulation in 2015 will be nullified by Congress before they’ve done much harm, but it’s not inevitable. As I wrote in my paper “Arrested Development: How Policy Failure Impairs Internet Progress,” net neutrality is bad for progress toward Internet convergence: "The Internet has reached an impasse because of inappropriate regulation. Restoring the Internet’s dynamic character will require innovation on the part of regulators that parallels the innovation produced by the Internet engineering community in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act." Hence, the outcome will depend entirely on what kind of Internet policy the 2016 elections give us.

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