Editor's Note: After reading the Google/Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal, we wondered just what would happen if it was actually adopted by the FCC. Below is our best guess. A correspondence from the future.
Are you old enough to remember the Internet as it was first imagined? A place of free expression, shared information, and equality of access?
If you answered no, then you don’t know what you missed.
Up until a little over ten-years ago, paying for internet access meant that you’d get access to, well, the internet. Sure, there were different speeds and data caps to consider, but the information flowed. Americans had such unabated access to information, online gaming, and other media through wired and wireless sources that newspaper empires, television networks and other giants of the media industry shuddered in the presence of the World Wide Web.
If you’re old enough to remember that freewheeling time of torrents, WikiLeaks, Hulu and The Pirate Bay, you’ll likely recall hearing something about a deal that caused a media murmur in the spring of 2010: Google and Verizon’s announcement of a suggested course of action to ensure net neutrality.
For those too young, or now too senile to recall, Google and Verizon announced that in light of the U.S. government’s failures to legislate regulations to ensure net neutrality across the nation, they’d come up with a few points that they were sure would do the job nicely.
Google’s Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon told Americans that they believed--and these are the broad strokes--that everyone in the country should have access to broadband Internet. Schmidt and Seidenberg also stipulated that they felt broadband network technology should be leveraged in order to improve the country’s power management systems and innovate the way that the nation’s healthcare and educational infrastructures are operated.
Like true corporate citizens, their suggestions were framed with protectionism. Schmidt and Seidenberg declared that, "While our two companies don't agree on every issue, we do agree generally as a matter of policy that the framework of minimal government involvement should continue."
In August of the same year, the two companies stepped forward in solidarity once more, reiterating much of the same dogma as they did in the spring, slipping in a new tidbit concerning the fact that while they were all for the government’s regulation of broadband internet, they felt that Uncle Sam should keep his paws off of wireless internet regulation because “…mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly. In recognition of the still-nascent nature of the wireless broadband marketplace, under this proposal we would not now apply most of the wireline principles to wireless, except for the transparency requirement.”
As we now know, Google and Verizon’s "not now" has become a decade long "not ever" thanks to the advent of the Broadband Freedom and Availability act.
The Act was first introduced as a bill by a Congressional representative from California in late 2010, and quickly became law in the spring of 2011, after repeated attempts to jumpstart both an earlier proposition called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act and the FCC’s Third Way Plan both drowned in the bureaucratic flotsam of Capital Hill. At the time, many of the country’s largest media outlets editorialized the privatization of government. We should have seen it coming, they lamented: With private security companies acting on behalf of the U.S. Military and State Department in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was only a matter of time until other sectors of our nation’s political infrastructure became, not only influenced by the interests of corporate America--that sort of thing was old hat--but controlled by them as well.
The FCC, an antique much like the radio and television technologies that it had been devised to regulate, had proven itself to be ineffectual when plied to the issue of internet regulation. The combination of their failed 2010 attempt to punish the recently dissolved broadband provider Comcast, and their milquetoast Third Way initiative left the door open to Google, a company already at the beck and call of the NSA to take the reigns of America’s internet regulation.
Back then, the move smacked of horse-sense. To millions of Americans, Google was the internet. They, along with Verizon, had ensured that broadband access was enshrined in the United States as a right, not a privilege. It made sense that if any private interest could be trusted to keep both hands on the wheel, it would be Google. By 2013, thanks to its inclusion under the Universal Service Fund, no part of the nation was untouched by the fiber optic fingers of broadband connectivity. The cost of broadband service, much like phone home service, was also standardized, making the business of offering broadband a perfect competition. Under the Act, wired broadband was protected: the companies that provided internet service to end users were no longer allowed to force Last-Mile throttling of content, nor could they offer multi-tiered pricing or usage caps. For a while it seemed that the public had won, and that for a change, corporate America had birthed an initiative that wasn’t evil.
It wasn’t until the stagnation of the wired ecosystem in the years after the Broadband Freedom and Availability Act came into force that the public came to understand what increased access to the web and the protection of available content would cost them. As the act had made it more difficult for internet providers to produce a significant profit from their wireline service divisions, telecoms began to pay significantly more attention to the expansion of the their wireless networks.
The telecommunications giants, left reeling by the restrictions placed upon them by Congress, viewed their unfettered wireless internet interests as a beacon of light at the end of a blackened financial tunnel that was growing darker by the minute. By 2015, complaints of dropped calls on any network in the country had become the stuff of legend. So too had the drive of tech companies to turn their genius towards innovating wireless computing technology.
The telecoms, Verizon chief among them, made sure of that. In addition to their increased spending on wireless network infrastructure, the giants of the telecommunications industry poured their billions into a two-pronged initiative designed to quell the woes of their shareholders.
The first part of this initiative saw the telecoms offering significant financial incentives to hardware manufacturers. In exchange for telecom funding, the manufacturers were asked to direct their research and development efforts towards the design of advanced wireless interfaces, such as smartphones, WiMAX 4.0 tablets, and most recently, retinal interface-based wearable systems. Tempted by enormous grants and completion incentives, stalwart computer manufacturers such as Dell, Acer, Hewlett Packard and even Apple shifted the bulk of their R&D focus to the development of wireless hardware solutions. As a result, innovation in the area of desktop computer hardware and software was left to hobbyists and boutique companies catering to institutional clients such as government agencies, educational interests, and the health care industry who continued to rely upon universal wireline broadband for their day-to-day operations.
As goes the bleeding edge of hardware, so too follows bleeding edge software and content. In order to leverage the free market that their wireless interests still provided them, the second half of the telecom's two-pronged attack involved the telecoms provided the same payola afforded to hardware manufacturers, to software development houses and internet content providers. As a result, now if you’re keen on playing an MMO like the World of StarCraft or want to watch an episode of your favorite web-casted 3D program, you’ll have to do it on a mobile computing device--the content’s simply not designed to operate on a low-powered desktop system. Of course, the privilege of being able to enjoy such content comes at a premium above and beyond the cost paid to purchase the software or even the price of your wireless service.
YouTube video of course, will stream just fine, no matter what you queue it up on, be it a wired or wireless connection. Google's pact with Verizon made sure of that. Other video streaming services have all but disappeared. Without the financial backing of the internet-powerhouse, they just couldn't afford to compete on the pay-to-play wireless internet.
A decade after the introduction of the Broadband Freedom and Availability Act, it has become clear that the legacy given to the American people by Google and Verizon is a new class of have and have-nots. The gift of net neutrality has turned out to be nothing more than Trojan horse of an offering. While the broadband internet connectivity for every man, woman and child in the United States is a reality, the services, and information available to the users of the, now marginalized wireline technology, have been slowly bled away through the machinations of our country’s wireless providers.
It makes us wonder who in all of this is worse: Those that would profit from a technology that once made the world a smaller, more accessible place, or we, a people foolish enough to have allowed it to happen.
