The intensely competitive nature of the Internet is vital to the American economy and democracy. So we worry that rules proposed this month by Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to guarantee the Internet’s openness may not be able to guarantee the survival of that competition.
Any new rules must prevent broadband service providers from foreclosing on competition. As proposed, the rules appear to come up short.
We supported an earlier attempt by the F.C.C. to classify access to broadband as a telecommunications service because it is the modern version of phone lines that carry our voices. This would have given the commission much more power to regulate broadband access than the current definition as an information service.
But an assault against this strategy led by the telephone and cable giants convinced the F.C.C. chairman to drop the reclassification and propose a more modest set of rules. It is important that the modest regulations be strengthened before the full commission votes on them on Tuesday.
The rules proposed so far have several weaknesses. For one thing, they forbid blocking Internet traffic or “unreasonable” discrimination against carrying some online content. But they do not ban the practice of paying to prioritize some Internet traffic over the rest.
Even more problematic is the treatment of the fast-growing new markets for mobile broadband access. While carriers will not be allowed to block Web sites or applications that compete with carriers’ voice and video telephony, the proposal exempts wireless from the rule barring unreasonable discrimination on the grounds that wireless broadband is new and unsettled.
Absent a bar against anticompetitive discrimination, carriers could stop competing GPS or mapping applications from running on their networks. The rules might even allow carriers to block the application used by a company like Netflix to stream movies onto a mobile device to aid their own movie businesses.
Only consumers should be allowed to pay to get faster, prioritized services. If corporations could pay for faster carriage of their content nothing would stop them from divvying up the broadband capacity, condemning less well-financed sources to move at a snail’s pace.
Fortunately, there is time to improve the proposal by Tuesday. It is virtually assured that the two Republican commissioners will vote against the rule. But the three Democratic commissioners should be able to close the gaps and protect open, competitive broadband.
Understanding that they can’t foresee every eventuality, we suggest that they keep open a Plan B in case their new guidelines don’t do the job: the F.C.C. should keep open its proceedings to redefine broadband as a telecom service. That’s what it is.