Network neutrality advocates just scored a huge win.
A win that a year or two ago didn't even seem possible for them.
Tom Wheeler: "No one, whether government or corporate, should control free and open access
to the internet."
The Federal Communications Comission said that both wireless and wired internet providers
are actually public utilities and as such the government can effectively regulate them
and force them to abide by net neutrality rules.
Now if you don't know what net neutrality is -- it is the idea that on the internet
we shouldn't be discriminating against different kinds of traffic.
Google should not be able to pay better, sorta faster internet connection to people's homes
than some upstart, startup search engine.
Net neutrality is considered by a lot of the people who were core in the growth of the
internet to be the secret sauce in why the internet has become such an incredible, innovative
place.
The idea is it's why you've been able to have startup after startup after startup come and
revolutionize the entire industry, why you've not just had the complete cementing of superpowered,
big monopolies in the way that you did with past technologies.
The problem is they didn't want to call internet public utilities.
That felt to them, you know, old school, big government.
It's like what the government would have done in the 1950s.
They wanted to seem like they were coming up with a more 21st century, lighter touch
alternative.
And so they kind of tried to split the difference.
They said we're going to regulate you a lot like we'd regulate a public utility, but we're
not going to classify you as a public utility.
Verizon, which is a big internet provider looked at that and said 'you can't do that
at all' and sued and won.
And as such, they gutted the net neutrality rules the FCC brought out a couple years ago.
That looked to a lot of people like the end of the rules that had allowed the internet
to flourish.
But the Federal Government, particularly the FCC, went back and instead of backing down,
they actually went harder.
So they went and just reclassified all these internet providers as public utilities.
that gives the Federal Government much more power to regulate them.
And they did it, which a lot of people didn't expect, not just for the fokls running a cable
to your house to give you the internet, but also to the providers of internet for smartphones,
tablets -- the wireless internet providers.
So this actually means that pretty much all internet providers now have to abide by net
neutrality rules.
What is interesting here isn't just the regulation but the philosophical point.
The idea that internet providers are so crucial to modern life that they actually need to
be regulated in a completely different way.
The government is essentially raising them to the level of electricity providers, or
water providers.
A public utility that the public has an interest in making sure is distributed and run fairly.