So the FCC finally dropped the actual text of the net neutrality order on Thursday, all 400 pages of it, and because I am apparently a person who has nothing better to do on a Thursday night, I downloaded the PDF and told myself I was going to read the whole thing before writing about it here.
I made it to about page 40 before I started skimming, and by page 90 I was basically just doing find-and-replace with my eyeballs, hunting for the word "Title II" and hoping context clues would fill in the rest.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about landmark regulatory documents: they are written by lawyers, for lawyers, and they read like it. The actual vote happened back on February 26th, 3-2 along party lines like everyone expected, and Wheeler's office has spent the two weeks since then apparently just formatting footnotes, because that is what it feels like reading this thing. There's a section that spends four pages defining what counts as "reasonable network management" and never once gives you an example you could explain to your mom. I've been online since dial-up and I still had to reread paragraphs twice.
I want to be clear that I think the policy itself is good. Reclassifying broadband under Title II so that Comcast and Time Warner Cable and Verizon can't quietly throttle Netflix or sell "fast lanes" to whoever pays the most, that's the right call, and I say that as someone who has personally sat through a Time Warner Cable outage call that lasted 51 minutes and ended with the rep telling me to "power cycle the modem" a fourth time. What bugs me is how opaque the whole process is designed to be. You had months of public comment, four million-plus filings to the FCC (a genuinely wild number), a huge coordinated internet campaign, John Oliver yelling about cable company mergers on HBO, and the actual document that codifies all of it lands as a wall of text that maybe 200 people in the country will read start to finish. I'm not even sure the people cheering loudest on Twitter last month have opened the PDF. I definitely hadn't, until last night.
There's also something almost funny about the timing. Half of tech Twitter this week is in Austin for SXSW, which kicked off Friday, posting pictures of BBQ and panel badges, and the other half is still parsing 400 pages of common carrier law. Two very different flavors of tech-industry March.
A small aside, since I can't help myself: I also went back and looked at the Apple Watch pricing from last week's event, because a coworker sent me a screenshot like it was a joke and I had to confirm it wasn't. The Edition model tops out at $17,000. Seventeen thousand dollars for a watch that will be functionally obsolete in two product cycles and needs to be charged every night. I don't care how nice the gold is, that number is absurd, and I say that as someone who will absolutely be buying the regular Sport model in April because I am a hypocrite about wearables specifically.
Anyway. Back to net neutrality, because that's actually the important thing here even if it's less fun to write jokes about. The rules aren't going to fully kick in for a while yet, and you can bet there's already litigation being drafted somewhere in a telecom lawyer's office as I type this. Broadband providers were never going to just accept Title II reclassification quietly, and I'd genuinely be surprised if this doesn't end up in court by summer. My personal, non-lawyer prediction is that most of the order survives, but the "general conduct standard" language — the vague catch-all provision that lets the FCC evaluate new practices case by case — gets picked apart the hardest, because it's the part even I could tell was written to be flexible rather than precise. Flexible is good for regulators. Flexible is also exactly the kind of thing a judge can call "arbitrary and capricious" if they're in the mood.
If you actually want to read the order yourself, it's public, and I'd recommend starting at the table of contents instead of page one like I did. Skip straight to Part IV. Save yourself the 40 pages of throat-clearing I had to sit through first.