Last week the internet went insane when the FCC announced it would likely repeal the Obama-era “Open Internet Act” which enshrined “net neutrality” into law.

Ajit Pai, who was appointed to the FCC by then President Obama, entered a dissenting opinion when the rule was enacted. He was later made FCC chair by Trump.

From Pai’s dissenting opinion statement in the 2015 decision (downloadable here):

“For twenty years, there’s been a bipartisan consensus in favor of a free and open Internet. A Republican Congress and a Democratic President enshrined in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 the principle that the Internet should be a “vibrant and competitive free market . . . unfettered by Federal or State regulation.” But today, the FCC abandons those policies. It reclassifies broadband Internet access service as a Title II telecommunications service. It seizes unilateral authority to regulate Internet conduct, to direct where Internet service providers put their investments, and to determine what service plans will be available to the American public. This is not only a radical departure from the bipartisan, market-oriented policies that have served us so well for the last two decades. The Commission’s decision to adopt President Obama’s plan marks a monumental shift toward government control of the Internet. It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works. It’s an overreach that will let a Washington bureaucracy, and not the American people, decide the future of the online world.

Pai’s dissenting opinion is 79 pages long. When you read it, you get the sense that the law would perversely protect large size incumbents and heavily penalize smaller upstarts. One example he cited was that the activists promoting the rule didn’t target AT&T nor Verizon with their first net neutrality complaint, but rather MetroPCS – a tiny challenger with single digit percent market share, who’s alleged crime was offering unlimited Youtube. What’s troubling about the original act The original act contains “The General Conduct Rule”, a broad, overly vague declaration that empowers the government to step in and literally control the internet for reasons that can be widely interpreted to mean pretty well anything. In then FCC Chairman’s Tom Wheeler’s words: The Order also includes a general conduct rule that can be used to stop new and novel threats to the Internet. That means there will be basic ground rules and a referee on the field to enforce them. If an action hurts consumers, competition, or innovation, the FCC will have the authority to throw the flag. What did that mean exactly? Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Techdirt (enormous respect to both, and both proponents of net neutrality) have concerns that the general conduct rule is too vague and could be abused. Given Obama’s later ruminations below, and events of the last year – the General Conduct Rule provides a legal justification for outright censorship: “We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to… There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world…That is hard to do, but I think it’s going to be necessary, it’s going to be possible,” — Barack Obama in speech at Frontiers Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, Oct 13, 2016 (emphasis added) So, you’re really worried about “net neutrality”? If all you care about when you think “net neutrality” is binge watching Stranger Things over your iPhone’s LTE while you drive to work, you may not be seeing the big picture. Also, don’t worry – even after the repeal your ability to do so will continue unfettered (see below). The gigantic social apps like Facebook and Twitter are known to have themselves run programs and agendas to shape opinion, control what people see or don’t see, and I would argue that these initiatives pose greater threats to a free and open internet than competitive issues around the raw connectivity one uses to connect to it. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently announced that the search engine giant will “de-rank” RT.com and Sputnik news.[1] Nobody cares, because the mainstream media has been diligently cranking the shriek-o-meter over alleged Russian election interference for a year now (nevermind that the US has a long history of routinely interfering in foreign elections and is doing so right now, in Hungary’s election). But if you think Google’s announcement is anything other than a “trial balloon” for future search engine shaping then I have an ICO for you!