Safe Internet Alliance

Guest post by: Stacie Rumenap, board member of Safe Internet Alliance

At last month’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the release of the National Broadband Plan, several ranking Members suggested that reclassification is merely a stepping stone for implementing network neutrality, which requires equal treatment to all Internet traffic.

While equal treatment may sound fair, it isn’t.  Equal treatment means that your phone call would receive no more priority than another person’s movie download, which means your call would be dropped as often as a movie download pauses.  Not a satisfactory experience.

It means if your neighbors are data hogs that clog the last mile access to your area, that your experience will be slower and less reliable.  It means that companies wishing to distribute mega-files (movies, videos, etc.) by the billions will be able to dump the tremendous costs of building out the network to handle the distribution of their for-profit content onto the carriers.  And you know what that means – not only will the carriers be subsidizing these very wealthy companies businesses, but so will you because carriers will have to increase your expenses to cover theirs.

It also means that carriers will be hampered in their ability to protect their networks and you as users from denial of service attacks, or other malicious exploits.  In short, net neutrality is not in consumers’ best interests.

Such a fight would surely spill over to Capitol Hill regardless of what the FCC does.  Already legislation has been introduced by Sen. John McCain to strip the FCC of authority over the Internet.  Conversely, Rep. Ed Markey is poised to give the agency explicit authority to control the Internet through legislation he recently introduced.  Experience tells us congressional negotiations would likely take years and cost millions in lobbying efforts on both sides.  And where does that leave consumers? 

So while Crawford by may argue for reclassification as a way to protect consumers, the question is protect them from what?  From the potential of delaying the delivery of some content to ensure that critical content (like phone calls) receive priority?  No thank you, I’d like priority placed on real-time communications, and a level of confidence that my Internet experience won’t be degraded by the guy next door.  We need Comcast and other Internet service providers to continue to protect consumers from spam and malware, and to increase their consumer protection rather than hamstring them financially, or limit their ability to give consumers the safest and best possible experience.

Instead of extending federal regulation on more of the Internet, Congress and the FCC should  focus their efforts on ensuring an open, safe and secure Internet in which free speech, innovation, economic prosperity, democratic participation, and e-learning can continue to flourish.