Put the least of us first in Internet policy

A Capitol Hill education policy influential has said to me for years, “when we think about education, we first consider the effect of policy on the least performing students. If it doesn’t prioritize the most underperforming, if it doesn’t put their needs first, we can’t support it.” That thinking casts our decisions first against the needs of real people, the most vulnerable, with the highest potential.  

Reframing today’s Internet governance debate under this thinking would lead to different policy avenues than the ones we are running up today. Net Neutrality as conceived in the proposal of the day — a throwback to laws seen as ill-considered for a modern, innovative Internet for the last twenty years would seem strange medicine for the future ills it targets, and ill-conceived to the real issues facing today’s netizens. 

{mosads}An Open Internet benefits everyone. The limos and the economy cars benefit from open highways. But the Open Internet isn’t really what is being debated in the large-scale campaign to treat the Internet as a utility under Title II. Net Neutrality is a well-framed fight to codify and preserve business relationships between multi-hundred billion dollar companies to ensure the long-term cost relationships between them. 

Silicon Valley’s giants don’t need our help to maintain their position. And neither do the ISPs.  The least of us on the Internet do have many needs. First among this group are the least Internet adopting urban and rural poor, and those lacking digital literacy necessary to compete and create online. Those people are not clamoring for Title II. They need the kind of programs that LULAC is running around the country, providing access to technology, training and mentorship. They need K-12 teachers prepared to integrate coding education in the classroom. They need jobs. And they need progressive opportunities. 

But sealing up cost relationships between the biggest players is not progressive thinking. 

Framing The campaign for Title II around free speech also borders on the absurd, when the same advocates for the “strongest possible protections” of a free and open Internet want a complex, utility-style one-sided approach to “protect” users against Internet service providers, but offer virtually no speech, service, quality, transparency or process protections to defend the users of big content or big social from the algorithms and data-mining applications that store personal data for sale to bidders and partners the world over, 24 hours per day, with little disclosure and less oversight. 

The Title II crowd also likes to ignore talk of the investment and jobs at stake in maintaining and building the future of Internet infrastructure. But a million blue collar, Latino and African jobs exist across the country, laying fiber, and upgrading wireless Internet towers. Is this unimportant in comparison to white collar Silicon Valley jobs? The answer is a clear no. And that is why a coalition of organizations continue to work with MMTC toward better thinking and a better solution. 

Would the Internet world end under Title II? Of course not. Business will always figure out how to compete through regulatory muck. But the move to Title II, utility-style regulation is significant because it throws a wet rag on infrastructure experimentation, and likely ends the possibility of deals that could bring any company to partner with an ISP in building out a new and novel, super fast health network offering, for example. Who could that hard line approach benefit? How could slowing down investment, of experimentation help the Internet grow? How could that benefit jobs? The loss of innovation will be in what we will not see or feel from experiments not undertaken, and business models untried.  

Many proposals exist for a case-by-case analysis of arrangements that would allow these partnerships in rare cases, and allow the Internet the benefit of experimentation and growth, while preserving Big Content and Big Social from the “list of bads” their business models fear most.  

Title II advocates’ approach to “zero-rating” plans is similarly unprogressive. These are the plans that allow a wireless customer to access a music sharing or social app or site without that usage being counted against the user’s data cap. They have been widely panned by the Title II advocates because it would violate their principles for net neutrality.  

One must ask, who does that ban benefit? Certainly not a low-income family, happy to stretch their dollars. This is not, as this piece began, “putting the least of us first.” 

Net neutrality advocates have framed a one-sided debate on the issues, drawn narratives that don’t fit the reality of the needs of real people, and framed differently thinking Members of Congress, national advocates, and those doing real work in communities on digital literacy and access, in a false light. Everyone wants an open Internet. But putting the Internet’s 1% ahead of the needs of the least of us, protecting the balance sheets of the biggest players at the expense of meaningful policy that promotes jobs and experimentation is not the direction we should go.  

It is time for Congress to act. Protect the Open Internet with strong, bright line rules against blocking and degradation, and cast create 21^st century rules that preserve the innovation and experimentation that will benefit all netizens for decades to come. 

Llorenz is an advisory board member of MMTC (the Multicultural Media and Telecommunications Council) and a part time lecturer at the Rutgers University School of Communication & Information. Follow on twitter: @llorenzesq