FCC Wrong to Focus Net Neutrality on Just ISPs, Campbell Says
Net neutrality rules and the emphasis on ISPs will lead to an Internet market that is less free rather than more so, former FCC Wireless Bureau Chief Fred Campbell argued in a new blog post. The weakness of the FCC’s approach is it focuses “entirely on ISPs,” said Campbell, now executive director of the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology (http://bit.ly/1rvcWi0). The FCC launched a rulemaking in May proposing revised net neutrality rules (CD May 16 p1).
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Google has had particular success “leveraging the FCC’s one-sided regulatory environment to discriminate against current and potential rivals on the mobile Internet,” Campbell wrote. Google has used the “Open Handset Alliance” to “contractually prohibit any major equipment manufacturer from producing the Kindle Fire for Amazon,” he argued.
Net neutrality supporters portray ISPs “as the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to gatekeeper or ‘bottleneck’ control” of the Internet, Campbell said. “For whatever reason, these advocates refuse to acknowledge that the companies who control mobile operating systems and devices have just as much or more bottleneck power than ISPs.” Apple and Google had no comment.
Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, said in response to Campbell that edge providers should be aware that they too could fall under net neutrality rules. “No matter what the FCC does right now, the authority it has claimed under [Telecom Act] Section 706 would allow it to regulate any edge provider just as it would allow [the agency] to regulate any broadband provider,” Szoka said. The FCC has already “opened the door” to the regulation of edge companies, he said.
ISP advocates never see ISPs as “ bottlenecks, despite all the evidence showing that they are,” said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood. Net neutrality advocates also care about market power in other parts of the Internet ecosystem, he said. “We just want the FCC to follow the law, applying common carrier principles to broadband telecom services as Congress intended, in order to preserve the open character of this essential communications infrastructure.” Handset, app and search engine companies aren’t telecom providers under the definition of the Communications Act, “no matter how much people are paid to muddy the waters,” Wood said.
ISPs are different, said John Bergmayer, Public Knowledge senior staff attorney. “There are special concerns with respect to last-mile communications providers, and we should deal with them with special rules.” Net neutrality isn’t supposed to be “the last word” on consumer protection, he said. “But calls to broaden it to the point of meaningless abstraction or arguments that you can’t address one set of harms without addressing all the others are silly,” Bergmayer said. “It’s like arguing that you can’t worry about clean water until you get rid of smog."
There is a “not insignificant risk” that net neutrality rules could be expanded to cover the entire Internet “ecosystem,” said Randolph May, president of the Free State Foundation. “There are certainly a lot of non-neutral practices that major Web content and applications providers engage in that, by design, discriminate against other providers with whom they don’t have business relationships,” May said. “It’s likely that practices from dominant players like Google, Facebook and others will receive more scrutiny under new net neutrality rules, even though consumers may benefit from such practices.”