Thanks, FCC. But Was It Necessary?

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

Whether last week’s 3-2 FCC ruling on Net Neutrality was a solution to a manufactured problem is debatable. So debatable, in fact, that I anticipate a debate on the premise that it’s debatable. But if there was any risk that the nation’s major ISPs could stifle small-to-midsized businesses by creating broadband “fast lanes” for deep-pocketed businesses and discriminating against peer-to-peer and file transfer protocols to serve their own agendas—and there’s evidence that some were already doing so—the ruling might be considered a win for retailers.

By way of background, under existing FCC regulations, ISPs are considered providers of “information services,” and they’re essentially exempt from government regulations. Left to their own discretion, some major national ISPs were toeing and sometimes crossing a data discrimination line by picking-and-choosing what consumers were seeing online, and charging content providers accordingly.  Through a tiered pricing program, ISPs could open fast lanes of bandwidth to the highest bidders, thus limiting bandwidth share for smaller businesses.

The headlines from last week’s ruling indicate that won’t happen now, which sounds like good news to small businesses. After all, a free and open, equal-access-to-all Internet is what allowed a kid at Harvard to push MySpace aside and build the world’s most popular social network, right? Didn’t it facilitate the 10-year maturation of a 1999 startup shoe retailer from zilch to a billion dollars? Even goliath Internet companies like Amazon and Google are champions of the ruling.

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