It shouldn't take a genius to understand that the broadband Internet has moved quickly from being a luxury to a necessity -- and therefore should be protected as a public utility.
But as is normal when anything can turn a buck, it also has become a political issue.
Thus, on Thursday when the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to reclassify fixed broadband lines under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, that vote -- dubbed net neutrality because it will prevent broadband and Internet service providers from slowing downloads to stifle competition or increase purchases and therefore jack their profits -- the vote was made right down party lines, according to PCWorld.
In general, Republicans decry it as unnecessary and business-killing regulation. Democrats say it will keep the Internet open and fair by preventing service and broadband providers from offering "paid prioritization," or fast and slow lanes where customers and/or web services must pay the for better speeds for certain content.
So what? In the simplest terms, if you're trying to get a message out about voting for a specific candidate or buying a specific pizza and your service provider hasn't agreed to pay a premium for speed (and passed it on to you), your message may be very s-l-o-w. Your competitor's may be faster -- so much so that yours is too late. Small start-ups or nonprofits would be the first to get shut out. Oh, and your streaming movies may not be so streaming.
Would this really happen? Of course it would. It already has, according to PCWorld:
"Comcast began throttling users who were causing large amounts of traffic on the company's network back in 2009. The throttling efforts were targeted against so-called bandwidth hogs, such as people downloading large amounts of torrents. Comcast was also hit with a class-action lawsuit (settled in 2010) over previous throttling efforts that began in 2007. Comcast was required to pay up to $16 million as part of the settlement. More recently we've seen reports of BitTorrent throttling rising in the U.S."
PCWorld reported that even mobile broadband providers had gotten into throttling. Last summer, Verizon publicly announced a throttling policy for heavy LTE data users even if you're on an unlimited data plan. "That policy was put on the back burner in October a few months after the FCC got involved," according to PCWorld.
But conservatives have taken to labeling FCC's decision to treat the Internet as a public utility as socialism or "government control" of business decisions that should be left to the marketplace.
A conservative columnist in this paper recently wrote: "The notion that every user of the Internet should be treated uniformly is quite a morally superior notion that is based on socialism and not on open and free market enterprise."
Don't like socialism and regulation? Stop driving on our public roads.
Think everyone should be treated uniformly, in other words equal? Stop claiming you support the Constitution when you clearly don't if that means equality conflicts with profits.
And free market enterprise is anything but "free." Business decisions left to the marketplace gave us such things as no insurance coverage for "pre-existing conditions" and private insurance premiums that went up every year -- long before Obamacare was a noun. It took the Affordable Care Act to right the "pre-existing conditions aren't covered" wrong.
Certainly the FCC's move will be challenged in court. To borrow a line from PCWorld's reporting: "When Verizon is so incensed about an FCC ruling it protests with a blog post written in Morse Code, you know this issue is headed to the courts."
But it's absolutely clear where entrepreneurs and the nation's Internet users stand. More than 4 million people weighed in on a subject that -- albeit important -- was aptly characterized by comedian John Oliver as "even boring by C-SPAN standards."
Wonky? Sure. But there is no doubt that the Internet also is a necessity. As such, it's in need of regulation as one of our public utilities.