Tell the FCC It Must Clarify Its Rules to Prevent Loopholes That Will Swallow Net Neutrality Whole

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released draft rules to reinstate net neutrality, with a vote on adopting the rules to come on the 25th of April. The FCC needs to close some loopholes in the draft rules before then.

Proposed Rules on Throttling and Prioritization Allow for the Circumvention of Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is the principle that all ISPs should treat all traffic coming over their networks without discrimination. The effect of this principle is that customers decide for themselves how they’d like to experience the internet. Violations of this principle include, but are not limited to, attempts to block, speed up, or slow down certain content as means of controlling traffic.

Net neutrality is critical to ensuring that the internet remains a vibrant place to learn, organize, speak, and innovate, and the FCC recognizes this. The draft mostly reinstates the bright-line rules of the landmark 2015 net neutrality protections to ban blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

It falls short, though, in a critical way: the FCC seems to think that it’s not okay to favor certain sites or services by slowing down other traffic, but it might be okay to favor them by giving them access to so-called fast lanes such as 5G network slices. First of all, in a world with a certain amount of finite bandwidth, favoring some traffic necessarily impairs other traffic. Secondly, the harms to speech and competition would be the same even if an ISP could conjure more bandwidth from thin air to speed up traffic from its business partners. Whether your access to Spotify is faster than your access to Bandcamp because Spotify is sped up or because Bandcamp is slowed down doesn’t matter because the end result is the same: Spotify is faster than Bandcamp and so you are incentivized to use Spotify over Bandcamp.

The loophole is especially bizarre because the 2015 FCC already got this right, and there has been bipartisan support for net neutral

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