I meant to do this two weeks ago and kept putting it off, the way you put off calling the dentist. But with the World Cup finally over (still thinking about that Götze goal, honestly, extra time, one touch, done) I didn't have an excuse left, so Saturday night I sat down and filed my comment on the FCC's open internet proceeding. Docket 14-28, if you want to go look it up yourselves, which you should.
Quick recap for anyone who's been avoiding this the way I was avoiding it: back in the spring the FCC, under new chairman Tom Wheeler, put out a proposal that would let internet providers charge companies like Netflix or Google for a "fast lane" to your house. The official line is this isn't about blocking anyone, just about letting providers offer paid prioritization if they want to. Which sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than four seconds. A fast lane only means something if the regular lane gets worse by comparison. Nobody builds a fast lane and then keeps the slow lane exactly as fast as it always was. That's not how any of this works, and I don't think the people writing these rules are dumb enough to not know that either.
Anyway. The comment period has been open a while now and it's apparently already the most commented-on proceeding in FCC history, by a wide margin, which tells you something about how much this is bugging people who aren't normally the type to file federal comments about anything. Part of that is John Oliver, obviously, whose bit on this back in June sent so much traffic to the FCC site that it fell over. I want to say that's a genuinely funny outcome and also kind of depressing that it took a comedy show to get people to notice a rulemaking process that's usually the most boring possible way to affect your life.
The form itself, though. My god. It wants your name and address (fine, standard), then it wants you to select a proceeding from a dropdown that isn't sorted in any way I could figure out, then it gives you a text box with basically no formatting and a character count that made me rewrite my comment three separate times to fit. I had a whole paragraph about how smaller companies and startups can't possibly compete with an entrenched player for "fast lane" money, and I had to cut it down to like two sentences to fit the box, which is a little bit of an on-the-nose metaphor for the whole thing if you ask me: even the system for telling the government what you think has a toll booth built into it, just made of characters instead of dollars.
It also crashed on me twice, both times right after I hit submit, so I genuinely have no idea if my comment went through the first time or if I've now filed the same six sentences three times under my own name like some kind of internet paperwork stalker. I'm choosing not to think about that too hard.
A few things I actually said, for the record, since apparently I'm now the kind of person who quotes his own government filing on his blog: that reclassifying broadband as a common carrier under Title II is probably the cleanest legal path even though it's the one providers will fight hardest, that "paid prioritization" is a euphemism doing a lot of heavy lifting, and that if this goes through the way it's drafted right now, the next Netflix or the next YouTube doesn't get built in someone's garage because they can't afford the toll to reach people at full speed. Maybe that's dramatic. I don't think it is.
The initial comment window is closing in the next few days, and then there's a reply period after that where you can respond to other people's comments, which I'm sure will be a wonderful, calm corner of the internet. If you use the internet for literally anything and haven't said anything yet, it takes about ten minutes once the site actually loads for you, and unlike most things labeled "make your voice heard" this one goes into an actual public record that actual lawyers will actually have to read. That part's kind of remarkable when you sit with it.
Also, small unrelated complaint: whoever decided government comment forms should not autosave your draft has never lost a paragraph to a crashed tab at 11pm on a Saturday, and I resent them personally.