Back in 2008, the FCC came down against Comcast after the service provider enacted bandwidth throttling protocols to slow down P2P traffic. The FCC’s bent was something I’ve been saying for years: filesharing is not illegal, though what is shared often is. So long as Comcast could not prove that P2P did harm to the network, then they had no grounds on which to slow any sort of traffic (Comcast claimed that filesharers were wreaking havoc, but the data at the time said otherwise). Now Comcast is appealing the ruling with the challenge that the FCC does not have authority to tell providers how they can operate. This may be true, but that needs to change.
From a strict perspective, we do not have any net neutrality laws in the United States – there is no law which says that internet service providers need to allow access to unfiltered content. In fact, back in 2006, Congress stopped five separate proposed bills which would have granted the FCC this authority. Presumably, this is for the same reason that we have absurd sex offender laws in the US: politicians could very easily invoke support for net neutrality to run disingenuous campaigns (”Senator Podunck supports allowing unfettered access to child pornography”).
It’s debatable whether or not the FCC can tell a provider that it cannot restrict access to content and transfer protocols. In my mind it makes sense to compare Comcast’s challenge to the challenges of strict constructionists back at the beginning of America’s history. These people argued that the government could not, for example, purchase territory (ie the Louisiana Purchase) because there was no provision in the Constitution granting such power. In that same way, Comcast is saying that the FCC is playing too loosely with the power it has.
As the FCC cannot simply set permanent, accepted precedents as the Supreme Court can, a law for net neutrality is required if companies like Comcast will ever stop challenging rulings against actions which basically screw the consumer. More generally, it would be nice to know that we as a people have a right to access anything on the internet. If people are accessing child pornography or other illegal materials, they should be punished as necessary, but to put up a dumb wall against general content will always result in problems. For example, a British ISP blocked access to Wikipedia because its filter regarded an album cover on the site as child porn.
Net neutrality makes sense the same way that censorship in libraries does not: people are entitled to information. I would go so far as to say that to prevent someone from accessing information is to deny what should be considered a civil liberty. And in the long run, having a group of people who seek the less publicized information is a good thing. Subversion leads to reform. Of course, this is all in excess of Comcast’s attempts to merely stunt specific usage of their service. In all likelihood, Comcast simply wanted to decrease the chances that an overzealous rightholder would take the company to court over filesharing. But that’s a problem with American copyright laws. To subvert net neutrality is to do far more harm that good.
