Welcome to the FCC-centric Internet, where all those with Internet disputes and problems go for resolution and justice.
Today the Washington Post heralds the FCC's New Internet Order in its article: "Net Neutrality Complaints Pile Up."
- Tellingly, after six years of the FCC handling only two formal net neutrality complaints, now that the FCC has unilaterally asserted sweeping authority to regulate the Internet in its Open Internet order, "net neutrality complaints pile up."
- What has changed?
- After six years of near universal perfect behavior respecting the FCC's broadband policy statement, has the industry decided to go rogue right when the FCC has installed itself as King over the Internet realm?
- Or are opportunists coming out of the woodwork recognizing that the FCC's rules assume broadband providers are guilty of whatever charge they trump up, until they prove themselves innocent to the FCC?
Make no mistake, the Internet is changing before our eyes.
The FCC's Internet regulation has short-circuited all three of the core and long-proven Internet mechanisms for resolving disputes and problems: competition, negotiation, and collaboration.
- And the FCC has replaced that phenomenally successful system with a discriminatory bureaucratic adversarial process geared to produce pre-determined outcomes against those who have been pre-classified by the FCC as inherently "BIAS-ed," i.e. those who provide Broadband Internet Access Service (BIAS).
No longer will competition for consumers primarily drive the Internet, because the FCC has set up rules that put the interests of edge providers above consumers, in specifically protecting only edge providers from any usage-based market pricing, while acknowledging its fairness and appropriateness for consumers.
- The new FCC-centric Internet puts faith in FCC regulated outcomes over competitive market outcomes.
No longer will commercial negotiations based on the facts of traffic and capacity be the primary glue enabling the Internet backbone to function, adapt and keep pace with exponential traffic growth, because the FCC has established rules that market-negotiated peering arrangements based on usage-based market pricing are presumed to be inherently discriminatory.
- The new FCC-centric Internet encourages many to complain to the FCC first rather than first negotiate in good faith.
No longer will the IETF engineering collaboration be the primary mechanism for resolving engineering problems on the Internet, because the FCC has inserted itself as the ultimate arbiter of what Internet designs and innovations are to be declared as "open" and which will be banned as non-neutral.
- The new FCC-centric Internet will now, on a case-by case basis, guide the engineering and innovation trajectory of the Internet, not the IETF.
In sum, watch and see how the locus of activity and focus of attention naturally gravitates away from the highly-functioning, self-executing Internet ecosystem of the past and towards the likely dysfunctional and illegal FCC-centric Internet of the future.
- The result will no longer be an Internet driven by merit as determined by competition, negotiation and collaboration, but an Internet driven by a still undefined concept of "openness" that is highly-subjective and super-political.
- Simply, whenever anyone cries "foul" on the Internet going forward, we must wait months to learn if three commissioners presume them guilty or if the accused has been able to prove themselves innocent.
Welcome to the FCC-centric Internet.
