Net Neutrality is a New Deal issue

First, a sincere thanks to the Crooked Timber gang, especially Henry, for inviting me to join the party. While I’ve been a long time lurker, I’ve never left a comment on this site—but then again, I don’t think I’ve ever left a comment anywhere online outside of Facebook or Twitter. Which is a sure sign that I’ve never blogged before. But what better time to start then at a moment it seems quaint, even antiquated? From what I can tell with a quick Google search, blogging has been dead since 2014. So writing this isn’t exactly like being one of those guys who sit in Washington Square Park writing poetry on their typewriters, but close enough.

I’ll also admit that I did briefly entertain the idea of blogging a few years back, and my basic concept was that I would write about things only after they had totally exited the news cycle, reflecting on whatever was in the headlines 30 days, or maybe even 365 days, prior.

So in honor of that not very good (and thus left to languish) idea for a blog and the fact I’m writing my first post approximately two decades after the word “weblog” was invented, I thought I’d share some recent thoughts about the Internet, specifically net neutrality, and the major blow dealt by FCC chairman Ajit Pai just before the new year.

Last month I was on a panel called “The Internet We Want” organized by the editors of Logic Magazine (a new technology magazine I highly recommend), co-sponsored by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America’s technology working group, and featuring a bunch of great folks (Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction; Moira Weigel, who wrote an excellent Guardian longread on newly politicized tech workers; Trebor Scholz, a leading proponent of platform cooperativism; and Evan Malmgren, who has investigated the potential of municipal broadband).

One of the big questions guiding the panel, coming from both moderator Ben Tarnoff and the audience, was how activists, educators, and journalists can connect concerns about neutrality to a wider range of social issues and a more expansive, democratic socialist political vision. Though Pai may want us to believe otherwise, net neutrality is not just about being able to post cute animal photos and dance around with purveyors of Pizzagate conspiracy theories (even if that’s what he personally wants to do on the open web). In reality, it’s tied to fundamental problems of distribution—of wealth, influence, opportunity, and freedom of expression.

As FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in her dissent, “the future of the internet is the future of everything. That is because there is nothing in our commercial, social, and civic lives that has been untouched by its influence or unmoved by its power.”

To be honest, since my book came out, I haven’t been that interested in continuing to write about the Internet. That’s because what drew me to the topic was never an overwhelming interest in technology for technology’s sake, but the way developments hook into larger questions of power, politics, and inequality. Since the panel, however, I’ve been thinking again about the problem of how to integrate tech issues into a wider political analysis and agenda—mainly because it seems a growing number of people are also interested in doing so.

In my opinion the time has come to 1) lift up the idea of an Internet public option (see municipal broadband above, which is one possible example of what this might look like) and 2) recognize the ways in which countless fields we don’t think of as “technological” are being transformed and start addressing these changes strategically (for example, as someone engaged in economic justice issues and debtor organizing, it’s essential that my colleagues and I pay attention to things like the rise of digital redlining, new forms of online consumer scoring, lead generation, algorithmic trading, etcetera so we understand how the ground is shifting under our feet).

Given all this, I feel like talking about net neutrality in isolation makes little sense. Instead, I’m inclined to see the recent Title II roll back as part of a broader attack on an array of longstanding, hard-won, and admittedly imperfect progressive institutions and regulations. Privacy, equal opportunity, consumer, anti-trust, and labor protections are all being eroded or circumvented through a combination of corporate might, well-funded lobbying, and big data. This is hardly a novel observation, but I was struck this weekend when I spoke to a young friend who had spent the afternoon making deliveries through the app Postmates, trudging through frozen New York City streets to deliver a single Starbucks beverage or a random order of fries. Despite the Polar Vortex conditions, when all was said and done his algorithmically determined pay was substantially less than minimum wage.

Seen in this light, the blow against net neutrality is less about the Internet per se than it is an attack on the legacy of the New Deal, one ironically administered by the FCC against itself. (Given the fact that the principle of common carriage or “public callings” at the heart of net neutrality can be traced back to the Middle Ages, maybe there’s some credence that claim that technology is ushering in a state of futuristic feudalism.)

Pai might be a particularly offensive FCC chairman working under a particularly loathsome president, but we have to remember that all was not well before the last election, even if things have taken a remarkable turn for the worse. Long before Trump, private entities and their celebrity CEOs were devising savvy ways to bypass inconvenient rules with only minimum pushback from overextended regulators, all while cozying up to Democratic lawmakers. Remember when FTC staffers tried to get the agency to sue Google for anticompetitive practices a few years back? Obama’s chief, Jon Leibowitz, declined to follow their lead. (Leibowitz recently resurfaced to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying the net neutrality repeal was no big deal. Unsurprisingly, it turns out he has also worked for Comcast.)

As I prepared for the Logic panel and revisited a few pages of my book, I was shocked that since its publication I had somehow managed to forget the degree to which the Obama administration had dragged its feet on net neutrality, despite the fact they now look like heroes in comparison. Reading through my old notes I recalled how the stage was set in 2009/2010 for a big push on the issue, but the FCC, under leadership of Julius Genachowski, instead punted and went with a weird half measure based on recommendations cooked up by Verizon and Google that basically sold wireless connections down the river. Only when the court struck that incoherent plan down, a new FCC chairman was in place, and years were wasted, did Obama finally make a real play for Title II, which meant the obvious solution wasn’t in place until 2015.  Given the fact the courts needed to respond to the reclassification, the FCC was effectively left only one year, 2016, to do what Title II allows, like implement privacy protections and affordable broadband access in rural areas while tackling various forms of infrastructure discrimination (like when poor neighborhoods don’t get vital upgrades).

As my friend David Segal, who co-founded Demand Progress with the late Aaron Swartz, told me, “If the Obama/Genachowski FCC had implemented Title II net neutrality rules in 2009 or 2010, alongside other regs that were contingent on a Title II foundation — like ISP privacy rules that were eventually implemented in late 2016 — it might have locked in these norms and made them less readily repealable, from political and perhaps also legal perspectives.” Indeed, that’s certainly the case with the ISP privacy stuff, which congress was able to effortlessly undo because of the short timeline.

I’m not a telecommunications lawyer, but it’s clear that we lost about five valuable years during which net neutrality regulations could have become normalized, and also that there was plenty of latent authority Obama’s FCC could have used to aggressively pursue the common good that sadly went untapped. (When I spoke with Harold Feld at Public Knowledge about these issues, he made another good point—not only did Obama’s appointees seem reluctant to act boldly when they took office, they also appeared totally unprepared for the determined Tea Party  style resistance their tepid proposals were met with, another miscalculation that should not be repeated).

So what’s the moral of this, my inaugural rant?  Tech issues are not just “tech” issues, and the many problems we face can’t be pinned on one party. And I guess blogging isn’t totally dead, so maybe there’s hope for net neutrality too. Or, better yet—since even robust net neutrality rules still leave so many of the social, economic, and political problems compounded by the Internet untouched—hope for a far more expansive, inspiring, social democratic vision of what our digital future could be.