GregHowley.com

In 1989, Robert Zemeckis brought us a vision of what the world would be like in 2015. Here we are, 25 years later, and we've got no flying cars, no hoverboards, no weather control, no giant holographic sharks, no freshly hydrated pizza, and no fax machines in the bathroom. In fact, life today really isn't hugely different from life in 1989. If you had to name just one thing that has changed life between 1989 and 2014, what would it be?

The Internet. I challenge you to name anything that's had close to as much impact. It's changed the way we communicate, the way we work, and the way we play. And the primary thing that has allowed for the internet to become as important and earth-shakingly transformative as it has is its openness. Amazon started as a tiny little online bookstore in Seattle that could carry a near-unlimited inventory and out-compete brick-and-mortars. Netflix started as a rent-by-mail business. It's hard to remember that they were once the little guys. Can you imagine if web giant AOL had gotten a patent on The Internet? We'd probably all currently be on dial-up service reading crappy news sites and surfing lousy chat rooms. There would be no Google, no World of Warcraft, no telecommuting, and probably no smart phones. The Internet's openness allowed for massive innovation. (and Al Gore's congressional work really did help a lot in kickstarting The Internet)

The point I'm trying to get across here is that openness allows for innovation. But today, in 2014, we're losing that openness. Right now - today - Comcast could decide to block Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime Video, preventing you from using those services entirely. Then, your best alternative would be to pay Comcast for their (directly competing) service. Of course that sounds ridiculous. Comcast would never do that because they'd probably be looked at for anti-competitive practices. But my issue is the fact that if they ever did, it would be entirely legal.

Here's the thing: while Comcast (or Verizon or AT&T or whomever) likely would never outright block competitors, they can very easily slow down their traffic. And they'd never have to tell anyone. The Internet is complex, and the packets that make up your Netflix stream go through a number of different channels between Netflix's servers and your home. Showing that an ISP slows down traffic can be difficult to prove, as there are so many factors that could be leading to reduced speed, and many are out of the ISP's control, so they have plausible deniability. And if your video stream looks poor enough or stops to buffer one too many time, you might just say "screw it" and jump on Comcast's offerings which are always fast and have a clear picture. Naturally - Comcast is both the content provider and the delivery mechanism!

While much of what I'm afraid of hasn't yet come to pass, I'm concerned about the boiling frog effect. In my area, Comcast charges over $80/month for internet only. They can do this because there's no other viable competitor. This is the exact reason Antitrust laws were brought into existence.

In the UK, where incumbent provider BT is required to allow competitors to use its wired broadband network, home internet service prices are as low as £2.50 a month, or just over $4

As Verizon says, it's all about the network. The infrastructure. In today's world, with The Internet having become as critical as it is, our infrastructure is too important to entrust to a few huge corporations. Imagine if a private company owned highways, electrical lines, or sewers and could limit access. Sorry, you can only flush your toilet twenty times today. Upgrade your plan!

Broadband lines and cell towers are communication infrastructure. They are important utilities, and they should be subject to the same regulation as power lines and highways. I won't claim to entirely understand the legal specifics of the "common carrier" terminology that's been bandied about recently, and there isn't a lot of easily locatable information about it online, but to my understanding, telephone service was long ago classified as a common carrier due to its importance as a communications infrastructure. This meant, among other things, that all telephone traffic had to be treated equally. This is one of the things that allowed modems to work. Remember your old screechy modem? Your phone company might have charged extra for that, or even blocked it entirely were it not for these rules. All it would really have required is them sending a brief interrupt tone over the line - it would have seemed that the newfangled modems were just glitchy and didn't work well. But common carrier rules prevented that.

Fast forward to today. The FCC has not classified internet service as a common carrier despite the fact that The Internet is every bit as important today as phones were forty years ago. There is no good reason for this, and it makes me angry.

I wish I could get everyone to understand this and make a formal complaint on the FCC website. Under the assumption that a phone call would be weighted more heavily than a website visit, I called in last week about this. It turns out that all this means is that I now have to wait for my comments to be transcribed. I'm still waiting. In any event, you can visit the FCC website and file a complaint here, and I wish you would. It should take less than five minutes.