FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler
Last week, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told a congressional committee that
reclassifying broadband as a communications services rather than an information service—thereby giving the Commission real teeth to enforce net neutrality—was "very much on the table." But Wheeler also said the Commission was working to determine whether it could continue to try to regulate internet service providers under a weaker provision of the 1996 Telecom Act. In part, he suggested, that's because:
"It's clear that there must be an open Internet," Wheeler told Rice. "That's what's necessary for small businesses, entrepreneurs and consumers. But communications carriers are investing $60 billion a year in infrastructure and we have to have that. We don't want to put in rules in place that would disincentivize companies from making that kind of continued investment."
Well, sure, but what about that massive infrastructure development? Where does that put the country now? Behind a good chunk of the developed world in connectivity, or in "broadband penetration"—how many of a country's citizens have access to and purchase affordable broadband. In 2003, the U.S. was basically in a tie for fourth place with a handful of Scandinavian countries, and head of France, the U.K. and Germany. In the leading country, South Korea, and most of the others, the government asked communications companies to pitch in on getting the wires all the way into homes and businesses—the "last mile"—upgraded and ready for broadband.
At the time, the U.S. held a tremendous potential advantage. Not only did every house have a copper telephone line, almost every house had a cable line, too. Blessed with such riches, in 2002 the FCC made a technical ruling that came down to a very simple deal. Keep your duopoly rents, federal regulators told the cable and phone companies, so long as you invest some of them in reaching more Americans with broadband. This was our third way. The U.S. has been conducting a vast experiment in what happens when you encourage monopolies in return for infrastructure investment. […]
The U.S. has slipped to 16th place. Germany, France, and the U.K. have passed us, and all the countries ahead of us have applied some combination of either opening up the last mile or paying for infrastructure at the government level. […]
What’s consistent about all of these approaches is that the U.S. has declined to adopt them. We have chosen, instead, to guarantee duopoly profits to our phone and cable incumbents, and in return have begged them to roll out more infrastructure. And for the past decade, telecom companies have pointed proudly in press releases to the amount of money spent on infrastructure. They have also lobbied to prevent the FCC from knowing too much about just what they spent or where they spent it.
The status quo that Big Telecom is lobbying insanely hard to protect—and that Wheeler bowed down to with the proposal he has put forward for a two-tiered system—has generated great profits for the companies and left the U.S. lagging in both technology and connectivity. Maybe we should be aiming a little higher than 16th place.
Wheeler needs to get that message. He's been hearing an awful lot from Big Teleco and its associated industry types. He needs to get out of D.C. and hear from the rest of us.
Sign and send the petition to the FCC demanding the chairman come out and face the public support for real net neutrality.