February 9, 2015 • 18 mins
The FCC Chairman has proposed reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II. Wait, what does that mean? Jonathan explains.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from com
be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
and today I'm doing a solo episode because it's about
some news that broke the day before I record this episode.
I'm recording on February fifth, two thousand, fifth Team. And
(00:27):
on February four, two fifteen, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler made
a statement outlining the Federal Communication Commission's plan to f
CC for reclassifying Internet service providers as common carriers here
in the United States. But you might wonder what that
actually means and why people are making a big deal
out of it. So I thought I would explain what
(00:49):
common carriers are in general, how have they applied to
the Internet or don't apply up till now anyway, and
how this might change things in the future, and also
just to clear up some misconceptions about the whole thing.
So first, in the United States, the term common carrier
is a legal definition that means an individual, a company,
(01:10):
or a public utility like municipal buses, which is in
the regular business of transporting people and or freight. And
that's distinguished from a private carrier, which only transports occasionally
or as a one time only event, so it originally
referred to a physical conveyance of carrying people or cargo
(01:31):
from one place to another. In fact, in the United States,
this was first put into law in the Inner State
Commerce Act of eighteen seven, which regulated the railroads. Other
countries have had similar policies dating back hundreds of years.
Some of them are formally put down into law. Some
are just simple traditions that have held over over the
(01:51):
course of time. But over time, the definition here in
the United States has expended to cover services that carry
more than uh these physical things. They can verry intangible
things like voice communication. Now, one of the most important
facets of common carriers is that they are not allowed
to discriminate against passengers or cargo. They're legally bound to
(02:12):
carry all of them as long as there's enough capacity. UH.
They also have to have the fee to carry the
passenger or freight to be paid. I mean that that
has to happen too, so they don't do it for free.
UH and as long as there are no reasonable grounds
to deny entry. So in other words, let's have an example.
Let's say there's a city bus with plenty of seats available.
(02:34):
That bus would not be allowed under common carriage laws
to refuse service to a person who has bus fare
unless the bus driver had reasonable grounds to deny entry.
So let's say that the person who wants to get
on the bus is waving around a huge club and
singing Beach Boys songs at the top of his lungs.
They probably wouldn't think that guy is safe to let
onto your bus. You might be able to argue those
(02:56):
are reasonable grounds to deny entry. However, assuming that that
person waiting for the bus has shows no reason why
you would deny him or her entry, you have to
let that person on by the rules of common carriage.
Another important element is that common carriers are expected to
charge what is called a reasonable price, sometimes a just
(03:19):
and reasonable price for their services. So this really means
a common carrier can't charge one person more than another
person for no good reason. Now, there aren't good reasons
to charge different amounts in specific examples. So let's say
you are a free company, for example, and you're hired
to transport hazardous materials. That could justify a higher transportation
(03:42):
fee for that particular job because it comes with greater
risk than what it would normally be for you know,
regular cargo. So there are exceptions, but otherwise you couldn't
say I'm going to charge everyone in this town one
price to ride on my train, but everyone in southern
town has to pay this other price only because I
(04:03):
hate that town, so that town has everyone there has
to pay me more as I don't want them on
my train. Otherwise that would not be allowed, so let's
move ahead. In nineteen ten, that seven Act was modified
so that it also covered telegraph and the burgeoning telephone companies.
(04:23):
One of the issues customers faced in those early days
was a lack of assurance that their telegraph messages would
actually get through to their intended destinations. So some companies
were charging extra fees to ensure that the message would
be repeated all the way down to the end of
the line. Now, courts decided that that was an unfair practice.
(04:44):
That a customer has a reasonable expectation that a service
provider will actually provide the service that was paid for,
and should the customers shouldn't be charged extra just to
be certain of it. Moreover, it should be on service
providers to prove they are doing their job, rather than
the burden being on customers to prove that the providers
(05:05):
are falling short because the providers are privy to all
the information, so they should be the ones who had
the responsibility to prove that they're doing what they say
they're doing. And another issue was the fact that the
telephone system in the United States was effectively a monopoly.
Bell Telephone, which became a T and T in eight five,
got a headstart on other companies and laid on infrastructure
(05:28):
that only worked with the phones made by Western Electric.
So you had this partnership between Bell Telephone and Western Electric,
which effectively meant they were the only players in town.
If you were an independent uh telephone service company, your
phones would not work on the Bell Telephone infrastructure, so
that edged out competitors. And in nineteen thirteen Bell Telephone
(05:49):
in the US Justice Department worked out a deal to
limit Bell from scooping up independent competing companies and from
preventing other competitors from using Bell's long distance lines. They
were allowed to use Bells network. This was in response
to an antitrust lawsuit that was being brought against Bell Telephone,
and in order to head it off, Bell Telephone said,
you know what, We're going to change these policies we've
(06:11):
had so that you don't sue us, and it worked,
and the value of the service was considered to be
too important to allow unregulated control of it. So that's
where we started seeing some regulation enter into the telephone industry. Now,
there's a series of tech Stuff podcasts about the history
of A T and T in which Lauren Voege, Obama
and I explored how A T and T came about
(06:32):
and how it was split up more than once due
to concerns like these. So if you are interested in that,
you should go check out those episodes. Now, getting back
to the telephone industry as a whole, in Congress past
the Communications Act, which created the Federal Communications Commission, which
oversaw radio transmissions as well as telecommunications. So this is
(06:56):
what established the Title two that the FCC refers to
today when it comes to I s p s. They
talked about reclassifying I s p s under Title two.
This is the Act that classified telephone systems as common carriers.
It's been amended several times over the following decades, including
extensive alterations that were made during the Telecommunications Act of
(07:19):
nine six. So let's move on to transmitting computer data.
Over networks in nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, before most
people knew about a network of networks. You know, our
bonnet was a thing. Internet was becoming a thing, but
most people didn't know about it. The common way to
connect to a computer was to use a modem for
direct machine to machine connection over the telephone system. So
(07:41):
you would have a dial up modem and you would
use it to dial a phone number. The computer on
the other end would essentially answer the phone, and then
you would have computer to computer communication. But it wasn't
an Internet, right, It wasn't a network of networks. It
was the machine to machine communication. Regular computer data was
considered a transmission service and fell under Title two, which
(08:05):
meant that any any transmission service cannot be prioritized, it
can't be discriminated against it, ow has to be treated equally.
But there were specific services companies provided in which you
could connect to a computer to get a get particular
information like a weather report or stock information or sports scores,
things like that. These were considered to be enhanced services,
(08:29):
so this was classified under Title one of the Communications Act,
which is unregulated. So the transmission was regulated, but these
specific services were unregulated. The enhanced services didn't fall under
common carriage terms. Companies could charge a fee for customers
to use them. That would be on top of any
phone bill for use of the transmission lines themselves. Okay,
so let's say a phone company offers up its own
(08:52):
enhanced service and some other company offers a competing enhanced service.
The transmission of data falls under common carriage, which means
that phone company could not prevent customers from accessing the
competitors enhanced service. That would be unfair. So this is
the beginning of the concept of net neutrality. The six
(09:13):
Telecommunications Act redefined enhanced services as information services and also
ratify the differences between transmission services information services, putting into
policy what the FCC had sort of made up as
it went along. So the transmission of services met the
terms of common carriage. The telephone company treated all dial
(09:33):
up services the same, all had equal access under the system.
The actual services, the apps that people were accessing, those
were enhanced or information services. That's not confusing enough. Let's
(09:55):
move into the early era of broadband. This is when
we start seeing dial up modems fade away and DSL
began to arrive. Now the FCC continued to apply that
distinctions made during the telephone era. The phone companies would
have to carry DSL signals as common carriage, they couldn't
discriminate against them. The apps are services running on the
(10:15):
DSL connections were unregulated information services. And then we get
to two thousand two. Now, this is when cable TV
companies began offering transmission services of Internet data at high speeds,
at least relative to dial up speeds at any rate.
And this is where things get muddy. See the FCC
classified cable broadband service under Title one, not titled two.
(10:40):
That means both the transmission of data over cable and
the information services provided would be unregulated. There will be
no reason for regulation there because it's all under Title one.
So why not treat cable transmission of data the same
way as the telephone system? Largely comes down to politics.
(11:00):
At this time, Republicans had a majority in government and
they favored deregulation. And the reasons for favoring deregulation was
that they thought it was going to promote risk taking
and competition and innovation. The in reality that's not necessarily
the case. I mean, if you look at the bell
telephone system story that kind of shows what happens with deregulation,
(11:21):
and it required the government to actually come in and
intervene in order to avoid a monopoly that could completely
take advantage of customers. On two thousand five, the FCC
said that DSL would also be reclassified under Title one.
So this makes the the whole situation even more complicated.
Telephone systems are still titled too, but DSL and cable
(11:44):
are now Title one and are unregulated. Now this meant
that cable and DSL companies wouldn't have to ask permission
to incorporate fast lanes for the Internet, so they could
give preferential treatment to some customers over others for a fee.
And because Title one is unregulated, there also no fear
of the FCC butting in should a cable or DSL
company block data they didn't want to carry, such as
(12:06):
data from a competitor or from torrent sites. So, you know,
we talked earlier about the common carriers. You know, one
of the defining factors is that they cannot refuse service
as long as a person is able to pay the fee.
If it's a Title one, it's not a common carrier,
and so it can deny service. So if you own
(12:28):
the transmission lines and you have a content provider like YouTube,
and you think I've got my own content provider program
where people users can upload video, and I don't want
to I don't want to compete against YouTube because YouTube
is gonna is gonna make my tool obsolete. I'm just
not gonna allow YouTube to go across my transmission lines. Technically,
(12:51):
you could do that under Title one, because there's no
you're not a common carrier. You're not You're not obligated
to carry all legal information. Beyond that, there was no
requirement for cable companies to provide services for a quote
just and reasonable fee end quote. They could charge whatever
they wanted. So in two thousand and eight things came
(13:13):
to a head. The FCC find Comcast because Comcast had
blocked peer to peer traffic through bit torrent. Now, first
we have to keep in mind there's nothing inherently illegal
or immoral or unethical about bit torrent. There's nothing wrong
with the technology. It's a method of data transmission that
works well for large files. Peer to peer is great
(13:35):
if you're trying to move a huge amount of information
in a relatively short amount of time. Now, some of
those files were pired in material, they were illegal files,
and there were plenty of huge files that were legal.
They should have been able to transmit freely. But because
bit torrent was being seen as the pirate tool, Comcast
blocked it. So the FCC gets involved and the FEC
(13:57):
says to Comcast, hey, you can't do that. You can't
just block this stuff just because you don't like some
of the activity that's going on over there, and Comcast
responds with, sure we can. We're not common carriers were
classified under Title one, not Title two, And the FCC
says uh, and it goes to court and the courts
end up agreeing ultimately with Comcast. The FCC doesn't have
(14:21):
the authority to regulate cable companies because they're classified as
Title one not Titled two. So that's why there's now
this move to reclassify I s p s under Title
two instead of Title one. So the argument for reclassification
is that it will require I s p s to
play fairly with content providers and with customers. The companies
will have to adhere to the rules of Title two
(14:43):
and will come under the regulation of the f c C.
So a company like Comcast, which isn't just a transmission
service provider but is also a content provider, can't favor
its own services at the expense of others. However, even
in this proposal, FCC chair Men Wheeler has suggested that
the FCC would forbear or waive certain elements of Title
(15:05):
too not directly associated with net neutrality, which includes the
requirement to share networks and on rate regulations. So while
cable companies wouldn't be able to block legal content or
prioritize traffic for sites for a price, they could totally
continue to charge customers whatever they like for their services.
So some people object to reclassifying I s p s
(15:27):
as titled too like the cable companies, They really object
to it now. They say that if the cable companies
are re or I s p s or reclassified as
titled to the Internet will become heavily regulated uh and
innovation will be stifled. But the flip side of this
is that it will be a fair playing ground. So
(15:48):
if we had access to lots of competitors in the
I s P space for service, I wouldn't be really
concerned about deregulation because we could always switch providers if
we didn't like the service, if we felt they were
being unfair, we could look to a competitor, and in fact,
that competition could drive everyone to being as fair as
(16:10):
possible so that they didn't run off their customers. But
the truth of the matter is that many people, including myself,
have very limited choices when it comes to I s
p s. In some cases, there's no choice at all.
You have one option. You either go with this company
or you don't have internet. And that's a problem with
dealing with an effective monopoly. The consumer loses out. And
(16:32):
the keyble industry claims that this regulation is going to
discourage those companies from investing in infrastructure because it will
hurt revenue to have regulation. They said that if the
government determines how much money we're able to make, then
there's no reason for us to try and innovate and
build out our infrastructures. On the other hand, it encourages
(16:54):
new players in the space like Google. Fiber, which is
investing huge amounts to bring broadbands leads two households in
certain markets, So if the cable companies wish to keep
their customers, they'll have to compete with the newcomers, which
means that it does encourage investment in infrastructure, it just
means lower profits. That's really what these big companies are
(17:16):
afraid of. So they either continue to compete by building
out this infrastructure, or they get out of the game entirely,
which I don't think is a likely outcome. Now. As
for excessive regulation, I don't anticipate that being a huge problem.
I think we're more likely to see the FCC watching
to make sure cable companies follow the rules under Title two,
(17:38):
should that reclassification actually happen, which isn't a sure thing yet.
I mean, we're gonna see a lot of resistance from
those I s p S. But I'm curious to hear
what you guys think of this issue. Do you agree
with this? Do you think that this is going to
lead to true net neutrality? Are you upset that the
FCC is willing to forbear certain elements of Title too
(18:00):
in order to play Kate I s p S. Do
you think the whole thing should apply? Do you think
the whole thing is outdated because it was originally meant
for railroads and now we're applying it to the Internet.
I want to know what you think I personally am
really looking forward to seeing that neutrality become a codified
thing in US law. I think it's well overdue, but
(18:22):
I want to know what you think as well. Write
me My address is tech stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or drop me a line on Twitter, Facebook
or Tumbler. The handle it all three is text le
hs W and I'll talk to you again. Really for
more on this and bathands of other topics. Because it
has to works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from com
be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
and today I'm doing a solo episode because it's about
some news that broke the day before I record this episode.
I'm recording on February fifth, two thousand, fifth Team. And
(00:27):
on February four, two fifteen, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler made
a statement outlining the Federal Communication Commission's plan to f
CC for reclassifying Internet service providers as common carriers here
in the United States. But you might wonder what that
actually means and why people are making a big deal
out of it. So I thought I would explain what
(00:49):
common carriers are in general, how have they applied to
the Internet or don't apply up till now anyway, and
how this might change things in the future, and also
just to clear up some misconceptions about the whole thing.
So first, in the United States, the term common carrier
is a legal definition that means an individual, a company,
(01:10):
or a public utility like municipal buses, which is in
the regular business of transporting people and or freight. And
that's distinguished from a private carrier, which only transports occasionally
or as a one time only event, so it originally
referred to a physical conveyance of carrying people or cargo
(01:31):
from one place to another. In fact, in the United States,
this was first put into law in the Inner State
Commerce Act of eighteen seven, which regulated the railroads. Other
countries have had similar policies dating back hundreds of years.
Some of them are formally put down into law. Some
are just simple traditions that have held over over the
(01:51):
course of time. But over time, the definition here in
the United States has expended to cover services that carry
more than uh these physical things. They can verry intangible
things like voice communication. Now, one of the most important
facets of common carriers is that they are not allowed
to discriminate against passengers or cargo. They're legally bound to
(02:12):
carry all of them as long as there's enough capacity. UH.
They also have to have the fee to carry the
passenger or freight to be paid. I mean that that
has to happen too, so they don't do it for free.
UH and as long as there are no reasonable grounds
to deny entry. So in other words, let's have an example.
Let's say there's a city bus with plenty of seats available.
(02:34):
That bus would not be allowed under common carriage laws
to refuse service to a person who has bus fare
unless the bus driver had reasonable grounds to deny entry.
So let's say that the person who wants to get
on the bus is waving around a huge club and
singing Beach Boys songs at the top of his lungs.
They probably wouldn't think that guy is safe to let
onto your bus. You might be able to argue those
(02:56):
are reasonable grounds to deny entry. However, assuming that that
person waiting for the bus has shows no reason why
you would deny him or her entry, you have to
let that person on by the rules of common carriage.
Another important element is that common carriers are expected to
charge what is called a reasonable price, sometimes a just
(03:19):
and reasonable price for their services. So this really means
a common carrier can't charge one person more than another
person for no good reason. Now, there aren't good reasons
to charge different amounts in specific examples. So let's say
you are a free company, for example, and you're hired
to transport hazardous materials. That could justify a higher transportation
(03:42):
fee for that particular job because it comes with greater
risk than what it would normally be for you know,
regular cargo. So there are exceptions, but otherwise you couldn't
say I'm going to charge everyone in this town one
price to ride on my train, but everyone in southern
town has to pay this other price only because I
(04:03):
hate that town, so that town has everyone there has
to pay me more as I don't want them on
my train. Otherwise that would not be allowed, so let's
move ahead. In nineteen ten, that seven Act was modified
so that it also covered telegraph and the burgeoning telephone companies.
(04:23):
One of the issues customers faced in those early days
was a lack of assurance that their telegraph messages would
actually get through to their intended destinations. So some companies
were charging extra fees to ensure that the message would
be repeated all the way down to the end of
the line. Now, courts decided that that was an unfair practice.
(04:44):
That a customer has a reasonable expectation that a service
provider will actually provide the service that was paid for,
and should the customers shouldn't be charged extra just to
be certain of it. Moreover, it should be on service
providers to prove they are doing their job, rather than
the burden being on customers to prove that the providers
(05:05):
are falling short because the providers are privy to all
the information, so they should be the ones who had
the responsibility to prove that they're doing what they say
they're doing. And another issue was the fact that the
telephone system in the United States was effectively a monopoly.
Bell Telephone, which became a T and T in eight five,
got a headstart on other companies and laid on infrastructure
(05:28):
that only worked with the phones made by Western Electric.
So you had this partnership between Bell Telephone and Western Electric,
which effectively meant they were the only players in town.
If you were an independent uh telephone service company, your
phones would not work on the Bell Telephone infrastructure, so
that edged out competitors. And in nineteen thirteen Bell Telephone
(05:49):
in the US Justice Department worked out a deal to
limit Bell from scooping up independent competing companies and from
preventing other competitors from using Bell's long distance lines. They
were allowed to use Bells network. This was in response
to an antitrust lawsuit that was being brought against Bell Telephone,
and in order to head it off, Bell Telephone said,
you know what, We're going to change these policies we've
(06:11):
had so that you don't sue us, and it worked,
and the value of the service was considered to be
too important to allow unregulated control of it. So that's
where we started seeing some regulation enter into the telephone industry. Now,
there's a series of tech Stuff podcasts about the history
of A T and T in which Lauren Voege, Obama
and I explored how A T and T came about
(06:32):
and how it was split up more than once due
to concerns like these. So if you are interested in that,
you should go check out those episodes. Now, getting back
to the telephone industry as a whole, in Congress past
the Communications Act, which created the Federal Communications Commission, which
oversaw radio transmissions as well as telecommunications. So this is
(06:56):
what established the Title two that the FCC refers to
today when it comes to I s p s. They
talked about reclassifying I s p s under Title two.
This is the Act that classified telephone systems as common carriers.
It's been amended several times over the following decades, including
extensive alterations that were made during the Telecommunications Act of
(07:19):
nine six. So let's move on to transmitting computer data.
Over networks in nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, before most
people knew about a network of networks. You know, our
bonnet was a thing. Internet was becoming a thing, but
most people didn't know about it. The common way to
connect to a computer was to use a modem for
direct machine to machine connection over the telephone system. So
(07:41):
you would have a dial up modem and you would
use it to dial a phone number. The computer on
the other end would essentially answer the phone, and then
you would have computer to computer communication. But it wasn't
an Internet, right, It wasn't a network of networks. It
was the machine to machine communication. Regular computer data was
considered a transmission service and fell under Title two, which
(08:05):
meant that any any transmission service cannot be prioritized, it
can't be discriminated against it, ow has to be treated equally.
But there were specific services companies provided in which you
could connect to a computer to get a get particular
information like a weather report or stock information or sports scores,
things like that. These were considered to be enhanced services,
(08:29):
so this was classified under Title one of the Communications Act,
which is unregulated. So the transmission was regulated, but these
specific services were unregulated. The enhanced services didn't fall under
common carriage terms. Companies could charge a fee for customers
to use them. That would be on top of any
phone bill for use of the transmission lines themselves. Okay,
so let's say a phone company offers up its own
(08:52):
enhanced service and some other company offers a competing enhanced service.
The transmission of data falls under common carriage, which means
that phone company could not prevent customers from accessing the
competitors enhanced service. That would be unfair. So this is
the beginning of the concept of net neutrality. The six
(09:13):
Telecommunications Act redefined enhanced services as information services and also
ratify the differences between transmission services information services, putting into
policy what the FCC had sort of made up as
it went along. So the transmission of services met the
terms of common carriage. The telephone company treated all dial
(09:33):
up services the same, all had equal access under the system.
The actual services, the apps that people were accessing, those
were enhanced or information services. That's not confusing enough. Let's
(09:55):
move into the early era of broadband. This is when
we start seeing dial up modems fade away and DSL
began to arrive. Now the FCC continued to apply that
distinctions made during the telephone era. The phone companies would
have to carry DSL signals as common carriage, they couldn't
discriminate against them. The apps are services running on the
(10:15):
DSL connections were unregulated information services. And then we get
to two thousand two. Now, this is when cable TV
companies began offering transmission services of Internet data at high speeds,
at least relative to dial up speeds at any rate.
And this is where things get muddy. See the FCC
classified cable broadband service under Title one, not titled two.
(10:40):
That means both the transmission of data over cable and
the information services provided would be unregulated. There will be
no reason for regulation there because it's all under Title one.
So why not treat cable transmission of data the same
way as the telephone system? Largely comes down to politics.
(11:00):
At this time, Republicans had a majority in government and
they favored deregulation. And the reasons for favoring deregulation was
that they thought it was going to promote risk taking
and competition and innovation. The in reality that's not necessarily
the case. I mean, if you look at the bell
telephone system story that kind of shows what happens with deregulation,
(11:21):
and it required the government to actually come in and
intervene in order to avoid a monopoly that could completely
take advantage of customers. On two thousand five, the FCC
said that DSL would also be reclassified under Title one.
So this makes the the whole situation even more complicated.
Telephone systems are still titled too, but DSL and cable
(11:44):
are now Title one and are unregulated. Now this meant
that cable and DSL companies wouldn't have to ask permission
to incorporate fast lanes for the Internet, so they could
give preferential treatment to some customers over others for a fee.
And because Title one is unregulated, there also no fear
of the FCC butting in should a cable or DSL
company block data they didn't want to carry, such as
(12:06):
data from a competitor or from torrent sites. So, you know,
we talked earlier about the common carriers. You know, one
of the defining factors is that they cannot refuse service
as long as a person is able to pay the fee.
If it's a Title one, it's not a common carrier,
and so it can deny service. So if you own
(12:28):
the transmission lines and you have a content provider like YouTube,
and you think I've got my own content provider program
where people users can upload video, and I don't want
to I don't want to compete against YouTube because YouTube
is gonna is gonna make my tool obsolete. I'm just
not gonna allow YouTube to go across my transmission lines. Technically,
(12:51):
you could do that under Title one, because there's no
you're not a common carrier. You're not You're not obligated
to carry all legal information. Beyond that, there was no
requirement for cable companies to provide services for a quote
just and reasonable fee end quote. They could charge whatever
they wanted. So in two thousand and eight things came
(13:13):
to a head. The FCC find Comcast because Comcast had
blocked peer to peer traffic through bit torrent. Now, first
we have to keep in mind there's nothing inherently illegal
or immoral or unethical about bit torrent. There's nothing wrong
with the technology. It's a method of data transmission that
works well for large files. Peer to peer is great
(13:35):
if you're trying to move a huge amount of information
in a relatively short amount of time. Now, some of
those files were pired in material, they were illegal files,
and there were plenty of huge files that were legal.
They should have been able to transmit freely. But because
bit torrent was being seen as the pirate tool, Comcast
blocked it. So the FCC gets involved and the FEC
(13:57):
says to Comcast, hey, you can't do that. You can't
just block this stuff just because you don't like some
of the activity that's going on over there, and Comcast
responds with, sure we can. We're not common carriers were
classified under Title one, not Title two, And the FCC
says uh, and it goes to court and the courts
end up agreeing ultimately with Comcast. The FCC doesn't have
(14:21):
the authority to regulate cable companies because they're classified as
Title one not Titled two. So that's why there's now
this move to reclassify I s p s under Title
two instead of Title one. So the argument for reclassification
is that it will require I s p s to
play fairly with content providers and with customers. The companies
will have to adhere to the rules of Title two
(14:43):
and will come under the regulation of the f c C.
So a company like Comcast, which isn't just a transmission
service provider but is also a content provider, can't favor
its own services at the expense of others. However, even
in this proposal, FCC chair Men Wheeler has suggested that
the FCC would forbear or waive certain elements of Title
(15:05):
too not directly associated with net neutrality, which includes the
requirement to share networks and on rate regulations. So while
cable companies wouldn't be able to block legal content or
prioritize traffic for sites for a price, they could totally
continue to charge customers whatever they like for their services.
So some people object to reclassifying I s p s
(15:27):
as titled too like the cable companies, They really object
to it now. They say that if the cable companies
are re or I s p s or reclassified as
titled to the Internet will become heavily regulated uh and
innovation will be stifled. But the flip side of this
is that it will be a fair playing ground. So
(15:48):
if we had access to lots of competitors in the
I s P space for service, I wouldn't be really
concerned about deregulation because we could always switch providers if
we didn't like the service, if we felt they were
being unfair, we could look to a competitor, and in fact,
that competition could drive everyone to being as fair as
(16:10):
possible so that they didn't run off their customers. But
the truth of the matter is that many people, including myself,
have very limited choices when it comes to I s
p s. In some cases, there's no choice at all.
You have one option. You either go with this company
or you don't have internet. And that's a problem with
dealing with an effective monopoly. The consumer loses out. And
(16:32):
the keyble industry claims that this regulation is going to
discourage those companies from investing in infrastructure because it will
hurt revenue to have regulation. They said that if the
government determines how much money we're able to make, then
there's no reason for us to try and innovate and
build out our infrastructures. On the other hand, it encourages
(16:54):
new players in the space like Google. Fiber, which is
investing huge amounts to bring broadbands leads two households in
certain markets, So if the cable companies wish to keep
their customers, they'll have to compete with the newcomers, which
means that it does encourage investment in infrastructure, it just
means lower profits. That's really what these big companies are
(17:16):
afraid of. So they either continue to compete by building
out this infrastructure, or they get out of the game entirely,
which I don't think is a likely outcome. Now. As
for excessive regulation, I don't anticipate that being a huge problem.
I think we're more likely to see the FCC watching
to make sure cable companies follow the rules under Title two,
(17:38):
should that reclassification actually happen, which isn't a sure thing yet.
I mean, we're gonna see a lot of resistance from
those I s p S. But I'm curious to hear
what you guys think of this issue. Do you agree
with this? Do you think that this is going to
lead to true net neutrality? Are you upset that the
FCC is willing to forbear certain elements of Title too
(18:00):
in order to play Kate I s p S. Do
you think the whole thing should apply? Do you think
the whole thing is outdated because it was originally meant
for railroads and now we're applying it to the Internet.
I want to know what you think I personally am
really looking forward to seeing that neutrality become a codified
thing in US law. I think it's well overdue, but
(18:22):
I want to know what you think as well. Write
me My address is tech stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or drop me a line on Twitter, Facebook
or Tumbler. The handle it all three is text le
hs W and I'll talk to you again. Really for
more on this and bathands of other topics. Because it
has to works dot com
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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