This Thursday, Ajit Pai, Donald Trump’s choice to chair the Federal Communications Commission, will force a vote to repeal net neutrality protections for broadband providers. This is an important step backwards for our democracy. It will affect what consumers pay for broadband and what we can buy. More importantly, it will affect what we as citizens can say and to whom we can say it.



In the age of Trump, a move to concentrate the power of speech in the hands of telecommunications giants whose financial fate depends on Republican political control is terrifying.

Quick guide Net neutrality Show Hide What is net neutrality? Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) treat everyone’s data equally – whether that’s an email from your mother, a bank transfer or a streamed episode of Stranger Things. It means that ISPs, which control the delivery pipes, don’t get to choose which data is sent more quickly, or which sites get blocked or throttled (for example, slowing the delivery of a TV show because it is streamed by a video company that competes with a subsidiary of the ISP) or who has to pay extra. For this reason, some have described net neutrality as the “first amendment of the internet”. Why is net neutrality under threat? On 14 December 2017, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to scrap regulations protecting net neutrality in America. In a 3-2 vote, the commission repealed the rules, which had been introduced by the Obama administration in 2015 to replace the patchwork of authorisations that had previously regulated the internet. In response, a number of states vowed to introduce their own state-wide protections of net neutrality. Who benefits from the FCC ruling? The most obvious beneficiaries are the large ISPs, who frequently have local monopolies and have now been handed the ability to discriminate between their own services and those of competitors, and charge other companies for access or bandwidth. But larger internet companies, such as Google or Facebook, are also likely to benefit from the decision. They stand little risk of being blocked or throttled, given how unpopular such a move would be, and can afford to pay access fees. They would also benefit from the reduced competition from smaller firms and startups, who are at risk of discrimination from ISPs. Are there implications outside of the US? Other nations have their own net neutrality regulations. The EU, for instance, passed a directive in 2016 guarding some key tenets of net neutrality, although allowing some controversial practices, such as "zero-rating" – declaring some sites free for the purposes of data limits. But globally, internet users will experience the indirect effects of the US decision, since its impact on the competitive market within America's borders will ripple around the world. For some, that could even be positive: if new startups can't get traction in the US, they may decide to relocate elsewhere.

Net neutrality is a rule against censorship and manipulation. It means that if you are a broadband provider, like AT&T, Verizon or Google Fiber, you cannot discriminate in favor of or against any of your customers. You aren’t allowed to carry the content or data of one website or video provider at one price and the content or data of another website or video provider at a different price. You can’t censor, throttle, or slow the carrying of data for any but technical reasons.



With net neutrality in place, whether you are a newspaper, a blogger discussing sexual assault, a video provider, or someone filming a public official at a town hall, Verizon or AT&T can’t slow or block your ability to put your content online and speak. Without it, they effectively can.



Why we should be wary of ending net neutrality | Emily Bell Read more

Net neutrality is a type of “common carriage” rule, and it is a bedrock of American democracy. More than a century ago, we had network monopolies like telegraph networks and railroads. Eventually, we regulated them via non-discriminatory principles very similar to net neutrality. In the 20th century, the regulatory framework for trucking, phone networks, airplanes, and electric utilities were also built on the principle of non-discrimination.



When you allow a private operator who controls a network with monopoly-like characteristics to pick winners and losers, they tend to do just that. In the 19th century, Standard Oil colluded with the Pennsylvania Railroad and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central to acquire control over the oil industry. They did this with a scheme involving kickbacks designed to destroy competitors. Similarly, meatpackers used their power over the rail network to centralize control and power over farmers.



Then, as now, the threat was not just commercial, but political. During the 1876 presidential election, which formally ended Reconstruction, the militantly pro-Republican Western Union telegraph monopoly colluded with the Associated Press to throw a close contest to the Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes, leading Democrats to begin calling the AP the “Hayessociated Press”.



In response, Americans put in place public rules to neutralize the power of these platforms. In the 1930s, for instance, Congress enacted federal legislation to stop AT&T from abusing its monopoly position in telecommunications. This legislative framework worked beautifully.



By the time the mass internet first emerged in the form of dial-up modems, AT&T could not block the use of its phone network to access it. It could not discriminate against you if you wanted to access, say, AOL or Compuserve. It could not choose to censor the websites you sought to visit or divert you to AT&T-approved content. We paid for the use of the network, not for AT&T to edit the public square.



In the mid-2000s, Michael Powell, chosen by George W Bush as FCC chair, eliminated important safeguards against telecom monopoly power, and set the stage for the removal of net neutrality-like common carriage protections in broadband. Competition in broadband died and the US, once the leader in broadband, fell behind the rest of the world.



For the next 12 years, as the fight continued, telecommunications corporations did sometimes censor traffic, but mostly they behaved. The telecom barons knew there would be a political reaction against them. They had to wait until their guy was firmly in power.



And now, he is.



The very same day Trump’s FCC chairman announced he was ending net neutrality protections, Comcast deleted from its website a public promise not to create internet fast lanes. In other words, now that the rules are poised to disappear, large telecommunications have decided to manipulate the flow of information in our society.



One thing this means is that you will get even less local news than now. As Matt DeRienzo, executive director of Local Independent Online News Publishers, wrote: “Big internet and wireless providers will be able to charge individual publishers for levels of speed and access, a scenario in which a handful of big companies with deep pockets could squeeze out” independent news publishers.



The man who could doom net neutrality: Ajit Pai ignores outcry from all sides Read more

For years, Senator Al Franken has been one of the greatest defenders of net neutrality in the Senate. Recently, he took the brave step of proposing that those same basic principles be extended to tech platforms like Google and Facebook, which already have ample power to manipulate flows of information and news. Franken’s approach is the right approach, the one we should all adopt now.



The Trump FCC and the telecom barons think that once the rule has been changed, we will simply forget about it. But they are wrong. If they eliminate net neutrality, it will end up being the downfall of the telecom barons. Americans will soon conclude that the only possible way to address the damage Pai has wrought is to finally and fully break the power of the giants.



Americans have been here before. The power of Standard Oil once seemed unbreakable. But it wasn’t. Neither are today’s telecom barons.