WASHINGTON
— Senior Republicans conceded on Tuesday that the grueling fight with
President Obama over the regulation of Internet service appears over,
with the president and an army of Internet activists victorious.
The Federal Communications Commission
is expected on Thursday to approve regulating Internet service like a
public utility, prohibiting companies from paying for faster lanes on
the Internet. While the two Democratic commissioners are negotiating
over technical details, they are widely expected to side with the
Democratic chairman, Tom Wheeler, against the two Republican
commissioners.
And
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who once criticized the plan as “Obamacare
for the Internet,” now say they are unlikely to pass a legislative
response that would undo perhaps the biggest policy shift since the
Internet became a reality.
“We’re
not going to get a signed bill that doesn’t have Democrats’ support,”
said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and chairman of the
Senate Commerce Committee. “This is an issue that needs to have
bipartisan support.”
The
new F.C.C. rules are still likely to be tied up in a protracted court
fight with the cable companies and Internet service providers that
oppose it, and they could be overturned in the future by a
Republican-leaning commission. But for now, Congress’s hands appear to
be tied.
The F.C.C. plan would let the agency regulate Internet access as if it is a public good. It would follow the concept known as net neutrality or an open Internet, banning so-called paid prioritization — or fast lanes — for willing Internet content providers.
In
addition, it would ban the intentional slowing of the Internet for
companies that refuse to pay broadband providers. The plan would also
give the F.C.C. the power to step in if unforeseen impediments are
thrown up by the handful of giant companies that run many of the
country’s broadband and wireless networks.
Republicans
hoped to pre-empt the F.C.C. vote with legislation, but Senate
Democrats insisted on waiting until after Thursday’s F.C.C. vote before
even beginning to talk about legislation for an open Internet. Even Mr.
Thune, the architect of draft legislation to override the F.C.C., said
Democrats had stalled what momentum he could muster.
And
an avalanche of support for Mr. Wheeler’s plan — driven by Internet
companies as varied as Netflix, Twitter, Mozilla and Etsy — has swamped
Washington.
“We’ve
been outspent, outlobbied. We were going up against the second-biggest
corporate lobby in D.C., and it looks like we’ve won,” said Dave Steer,
director of advocacy for the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit
technology foundation that runs Firefox, a popular Web browser,
referring to the cable companies. “A year ago today, we did not think we
would be in this spot.”
The
net neutrality movement pitted new media against old and may well have
revolutionized notions of corporate social responsibility and activism.
Top-down decisions by executives investing in or divesting themselves of
resources, paying lobbyists and buying advertisements were upended by
the mobilization of Internet customers and users.
“We
don’t have an army of lobbyists to deploy. We don’t have financial
resources to throw around,” said Liba Rubenstein, director of social
impact and public policy at the social media company Tumblr, which is
owned by Yahoo, the large Internet company, but operated independently
on the issue. “What we do have is access to an incredibly engaged,
incredibly passionate user base, and we can give folks the tools to
respond.”
Internet
service providers say heavy-handed regulation of the Internet will
diminish their profitability and crush investment to expand and speed up
Internet access. It could even open the web to taxation to pay for new
regulators.
Brian
Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications
Association, said the pro-net-neutrality advocates turned a complex and
technical debate over how best to keep the Internet operating most
efficiently into a matter of religion. The forces for stronger
regulation, he said, became viewed as for the Internet. Those opposed to
the regulation were viewed as against the Internet.
The
Internet companies, he said, sometimes mislead their customers, and in
some cases, are misled on the intricacies of the policy.
“Many of the things they have said just belie reality and common sense,” he said.
In
April, a dozen New York-based Internet companies gathered at Tumblr’s
headquarters in the Flatiron district to hear dire warnings that
broadband providers were about to obtain the right to charge for the
fastest speeds on the web.
The implication: If they did not pony up, they would be stuck in the slow lane.
What
followed was the longest, most sustained campaign of Internet activism
in history. A swarm of small players, like Tumblr, Etsy, BoingBoing and
Reddit, overwhelmed the giants of the broadband world, Comcast, Verizon
Communications and Time Warner Cable. Two of the biggest players on the
Internet, Amazon and Google, largely stayed in the background, while
smaller participants — some household names like Twitter and Netflix,
others far more obscure, like Chess.com and Urban Dictionary — mobilized a grass-roots crusade.
“Our
community is the source of our power,” said Althea Erickson, director
of public policy at Etsy, an online craft market, where users
embroidered pillows and engraved spoons promoting net neutrality.
In
mid-October, the tech activist group Fight for the Future acquired the
direct telephone numbers of about 30 F.C.C. officials, circumventing the
agency’s switchboard to send calls directly to policy makers. That set
off a torrent of more than 55,000 phone calls until the group turned off
the spigot on Dec. 3.
In
November, President Obama cited “almost four million public comments”
when he publicly pressured the F.C.C. to turn away from its paid “fast
lane” proposal and embrace a new regulatory regime.
Since
then, the lobbying has grown only more intense. Last week, 102 Internet
companies wrote to the F.C.C. to say the threat of Internet service
providers “abusing their gatekeeper power to impose tolls and
discriminate against competitive companies is the real threat to our
future,” not “heavy-handed regulation” and possible taxation, as
conservatives in Washington say.
Republicans have grown much quieter under the barrage.
“Tech
companies would be better served to work with Congress on clear rules
for the road. The thing that they’re buying into right now is a lot of
legal uncertainty,” said Mr. Thune. “I’m not sure exactly what their
thinking is.”
Mr.
Thune said he was still willing to work with Democrats on legislation
that he said would do what the F.C.C. is trying to accomplish, without a
heavy regulatory hand: Ban paid “fast lanes” and stop intentional
slowdowns — or “throttling” — by broadband companies seeking payment
from Internet content providers.
But even he said Democrats were ready to let the F.C.C. do the job.
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