Imagine a world where the company that you pay for cable and internet (ISPs e.g. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox) would have control over which companies get to succeed in the e-commerce market. If the FCC and it’s chairman Ajit Pai get its way, and remove Net Neutrality protections that are already in place, then this hypothetical situation will come to fruition in reality. Net Neutrality is the idea that all data is equal. It prevents ISPs from discriminating between different uses of data. For example, let’s take two different uses of data, Facebook, web browsing, and Netflix, video on demand. If the protections are removed then the ISPs would have the full legal power to throttle your internet speeds to Netflix since it uses more  data than simple web browsing. This can set a dangerous standard in the industry that can hurt you, the consumer, in more ways that you may think at the moment. Removing these protections will also hurt small businesses who play a large role in America's economy. The only entities that stand to gain from the decision to roll back protections would be large corporations who already hold near unchecked power in regards to the industry. In order to protect consumers, small businesses, and check power of ISPs Net  Neutrality protections must be preserved and upheld by the FCC. 

Consumer protection is the very reason for the FCC to exist. The FCC is acting against the best interests of the consumers by trying to repeal the TItle II protections set by the past FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler.  In addition to the Title II protections the FCC also gave itself more power to regulate ISPs (Solon, 2017).The internet being classified as a Title II service  means, in the words of John Bane, “ It is classified as a utility, that means it’s similar to something like water or electricity. You can only charge for the resource used, you can’t charge extra for what it was used for. You can’t charge a premium if you decide to pour water into a glass and drink it versus using it to water your plants” (TotalBiscuit, 2017). With how important the internet is for daily life in America and the rest of the world it is, and should be, classified as a utility. Think about all of the actions that require internet in daily life. Most job applications are online only,  the internet is a library that is accessible from anywhere and is a great learning tool for everyone, and is even required in schools. With the internet having such an important role in the lives of americans, the consumers need to have protections from ISPs. A common counter argument against net neutrality is that consumers can swap to another ISP if the one they currently have is not behaving the way it should be. Former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler provided the statistic, “Three-quarters of American homes have no competitive choice for the essential infrastructure of the 21st century” (Wheeler, 2015). Another source stated “Only about half of residential consumers have a choice between even two providers.” (Economides, 2008) Given the time stamps of these two quotes you can see that not only has the competition between ISPs not grown, but has actually regressed. This is in direct counter to what opponents of net neutrality believe. How can there be a choice in the free market if there is only one option for the vast majority of Americans? Think about your experiences when you have either moved to a new place or even tried to shop around for internet deals. Chances are your story is the same as many others, nothing but the one company that has a regional monopoly. With the lack of competition consumer protections are needed to protect against monopolistic practices. Since protections were put into place in 2015 it is imperative that we keep them in face of the current FCC who wants to roll them back. If the protections get removed, there will be nothing standing in the ISPs way of slowing down their competitors of their subsidiary companies and services unless they pay a large price. Let us take NBC for example, NBC owns a video streaming service that competes with Netflix, Hulu, and other TV streaming services. NBC is owned by Comcast, without these protections there would be nothing standing in their way of forcing Netflix and Hulu to pay an exorbitant amount of money for the same speeds that they would give NBC. Netflix and Hulu would have to pay up to the mob boss in order to stay competitive with Comcast's consumer base, which according to the FCC is over half of the at home high speed internet plans, which is near necessary for video streaming sites to work reliably. This would take a large chunk of profits from Netflix and Hulu, they in turn would be forced to pass the payments onto the customers with higher monthly payments. An example of the horrors that are occurring at the moment when both net neutrality protections are not put into place and monopolistic companies are in power is what is MEOs (ISP and Cell provider) cell phone plans in Portugal. The portuguese ISP and telephone provider MEO has started to tier their phone internet plans. Costing extra money for the different packages: “Messaging; Whatsapp, Skype, Viber, IMessage, and Facetime. Video; Youtube, Netflix, Twitch. As well as extra plans for Music, Social, and Email”  (Meo). As you can see this is a terrible outcome for the consumer. By removing the protections we currently have in place the government would be allowing our ISPs to do the same, tiering our internet like TV packages, which no one wants. This is the very nature of the problem, companies that are publicly traded and are expected to raise profits in order to raise the stock price and cannot be trusted with this kind of power over something so essential to our daily lives. In addition to Net Neutrality protections being necessary for financial reasons of the consumer, but also for principle reasons. By removing net neutrality protections, the FCC is giving the ISPs the power to censor criticism of their company, slow speeds of competitors for those that do compete with them in those select regions, and potentially give better connection speeds to companies that hold their political values. All of these ISPs would be incentivised to interfere with traffic (Stanley, 2010).  A common counter argument by the ISPs is that they would never do such things. For that I have two counterpoints. The first is that would you trust the companies who tack on extra and hidden fees in order to raise your cable and internet bills? The second point is targeting the very nature of the ISPs statement, The ISPs are telling you “We have a gun pointed at criticism and competition, but we won't shoot.” With the main ISPs being publicly traded companies, they cannot be trusted to not act in the best interest of profits. 

Consumers are not the only entities that will be affected, small businesses will be affected as well. Small businesses could potentially be hit hard by what is known as “paid prioritization”. Paid prioritization is exactly what it sounds like, paying more to have faster access to customers. Some of the best companies we have now started as small companies that made their way up to where they are now by having the best service available, not because a company gave them preferential treatment (e.g. Amazon, Netflix, Facebook). The data discrimination technologies that ISPs have available to them now were not of the same scale before these protections were put into place, which meant that they were free to access their customers the same as any other company. Let us create a hypothetical situation in which Comcast owned Myspace and had the technology to discriminate data effectively before the protections were put in place. Comcast would have had the power to drown out Facebook before it took off by slowing its speeds down to a snails crawl if they didn’t pay a large price, which Facebook, at the time being very small, would not have been able pay for the price required, and would have had to shut down. This would have changed the way we know the internet as we know it if it had happened. So why would we allow ISPs to do that anticompetitive behavior now? 

This potential anti-competitive behavior is part of the reason why the protections were put into place in 2015. This paid prioritization was brought up at a congressional hearing near the time of the Title II adoption. “Meaningful rules would stop so-called “paid prioritization” deals that would allow large corporations to drown out smaller competitors.” (United States Senate, 2). With this in mind and the fact that small businesses are many people's livelihoods it goes against American ideals to allow large established companies drown out start ups because they dared to enter a market with a pre established company in place. To use a more concrete example than the hypothetical earlier would be T-Mobile breaking the FCC protections by instating an “unlimited” data for their service “Binge On”, which may sound nice on the surface but it sets a very dangerous precedent. This is the concept of “zero rating” according to Barbara van Schewick, a law professor at Stanford, “The practice of exempting select applications from customers’ monthly bandwidth caps” (Van Schewick, 6)  This stifles competition by making the Binge On service immediately more desirable than non providers which can hurt small businesses by setting them up to fail by virtue of an uneven playing field. Without these protections many companies would have their own forms of zero rating which would seal the fate of new startups trying to make an impact into that market. Innovation of service is what the internet was built on and is how many small businesses survive today. By allowing these types of zero rating services hurts this innovation by removing competition from providers and creates no incentive to innovate and improve their service. In addition to this, Van Schewick also stated, “ It requires video providers to work with T-Mobile to join Binge On and, in many cases, to change their service to meet the ISP’s technical requirements” (Van Schewick, 4). The standards pose an issue into innovation because providers and creators on the Binge On platform would have to create content that must be approved by T-Mobile in order to stay on their service, and being taken off their service would be a huge cut to profits for many of the services provided as many people would use other services that are allowed. These standards could be anything from refraining from certain speech or topics on user created content, such as the T-Mobile owned Vessel, which can inhibit freedom of speech and conversations surrounding difficult topics. Small businesses that would want to join the Binge On service would have to change their platform and content in order to fit these standards which stifles innovation.

A central theme throughout this argument has been about power. Specifically power disparity between consumers and ISPs, which will become increasingly one sided if these Title II protections are rolled back by the FCC. ISPs already have too much power in how the internet is delivered to the consumer, they should not be allowed to have more power in how it is used. To elaborate, ISPs have virtually unchecked power in terms of competition. As I have stated in the previous paragraphs, ISPs in a given region will stay out of the way of each other creating regional monopolies that will give the consumer only one choice of where to buy high speed internet. This in itself creates a huge imbalance of power in the consumer-provider relationship. One example of this is the person who coined the term Net Neutrality states that the real issue is the extremely small amount of internet providers (McMillan, 2014). This is particularly interesting when examining the arguments against Net Neutrality. The main opponents of Net Neutrality are ISPs, the FCC’s current chairman is a former lawyer of Verizon, and their main argument is that is an ISP is doing nefarious things and you, the consumer, does not like their business you can go elsewhere. Which is in direct contrast to the reality of internet in America, you have very little, if any, choice in where you get your internet from. With many people dissatisfied with how the situation is, many companies and municipalities have tried to create their own broadband network. However one main and recurring problem that happens when a new company or municipality that tries to start up in an incumbent's area is lawsuits. ISPs like Comcast are notorious for suing to delay the challengers and in many cases try to bankrupt them by wasting their time or try to stop them coming in at all. One well known, and recent example, is when Comcast sues Nashville Tennessee for trying to pass a law that would help Google Fiber come into the area and create competition for Comcast (Brodkin, 2016). This monopolistic behaviour happens all around the country and is the main reason for this imbalance in power between the consumer and the ISP. Since ISPs currently have near unchecked power in how they deliver and sell the internet to consumers. With the ISPs having near monopolies in their areas it is no wonder why service is unreliable and expensive in the majority of the US. With having no competition there is no reason to improve your service stability or expand your network capability and speeds. With the ISPs having near unchecked regional monopolies in mind, we cannot let them have power over how we use the internet as it will be used to stifle competition and increase profits for the ISPs.

Currently the FCC is trying to take away vital protections that stop ISPs from changing the internet as we know it to benefit no one but the ISPs. The FCC is holding the vote to roll back Title II protections of the internet, classifying it as a utility, in December. This vote will be extremely important as it will shape how we pay, view, and consume the internet for years to come. I have shown you that by taking these protections away you, the consumer will be negatively impacted and may end up paying more for the same speeds that you currently have, and will hurt the small business owners that are a vital part of America's economy and the ideals of the American dream itself, and finally I have shown you the power that ISPs currently hold on how the internet is distributed and we cannot allow for them to gain power over how we consume the internet. I urge you call your senators and representatives directly and tell them that you are against the roll back of Title II protections on the Internet. Tell them that this is not a partisan issue, this is not Democrat vs. Republican issue. This is a consumer vs. corporate interest issue. The only way to keep Net Neutrality and keep the internet the way it is, is by letting your voices be heard and to let your representatives know your stance. 
