So this happened today and I don't think it's going to get the attention it deserves, at least not outside the people who already read Ars Technica for fun.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this morning in Verizon v. FCC and basically gutted the open internet rules the FCC put in place back in 2010. The anti-blocking and anti-discrimination provisions, the parts that actually stopped an ISP from doing something like slowing down Netflix traffic unless Netflix paid up, are gone. The court didn't say the FCC has no authority here at all, it said the agency classified broadband under the wrong part of the Communications Act and then tried to impose common-carrier-style rules on a service it had specifically decided wasn't a common carrier. Judge Tatel wrote the opinion if I'm remembering right, and even he seemed to think the FCC brought this on itself by choosing that classification years ago instead of just treating broadband like a utility from the start. The transparency requirement survives, so at least your ISP still technically has to disclose how it manages your traffic. Whether anyone reads those disclosures is a separate question.
I called my dad about something unrelated tonight and mentioned this and he had genuinely no idea what net neutrality even means, and I don't think that's on him. It's a boring phrase for a concept that only feels real once your Netflix starts buffering during the one scene you actually wanted to watch. And that's sort of the problem with this whole fight, the effects show up as a slightly worse experience that's easy to blame on your wifi instead of your ISP's business decisions.
Here's the thing that actually worries me and it's not some hypothetical slippery slope. Comcast and Netflix have already been sniping at each other over interconnection and peering, and there's been chatter for weeks about Netflix traffic getting throttled at the point where it hands off to Comcast's network, separate from any official net neutrality rule. Take away the rules that were at least nominally stopping ISPs from favoring their own traffic or extracting tolls from content companies, and you've removed the one thing that made that kind of leverage look risky instead of routine. Comcast is also trying to buy Time Warner Cable, or at least everyone assumes that's coming, and a bigger Comcast with fewer rules is not a combination that should make anyone relax.
I want to be clear I'm not neutral about neutrality, pun intended and I'm sorry. I think the rules the court just struck down were the minimum viable version of a good idea, and losing even that minimum is bad. Verizon sued because Verizon wants to be able to charge companies like Google or Netflix for priority access to its pipes, on top of what those companies already pay for bandwidth, on top of what you already pay for your connection. That's three tolls on the same road. If you think that ends anywhere good for the person actually watching House of Cards on a Tuesday night, I'd love to hear the argument, because I can't construct it.
Tom Wheeler is the new FCC chairman as of a few months back, and this lands squarely in his lap now. He's got options, technically, up to and including reclassifying broadband as a Title II service the way plenty of people wanted the FCC to do in the first place instead of writing rules that couldn't survive a lawsuit from a company with Verizon's legal budget. Whether he actually does that is a different question. My guess, and it's just a guess, is that this drags on for years and gets solved (or doesn't) through some messy combination of new rulemaking, more lawsuits, and a lot of press releases claiming victory from every side involved.
Anyway. I was going to write something about CES this week since I've had the browser tabs open since Sunday, but this felt like the thing actually worth typing out before I forget how annoyed I am about it. The CES stuff can wait, none of it is going anywhere.