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Six years ago, the Santa Clara County Fire Department was battling one of the largest wildfires ever to break out in California, the Mendocino Complex fire. With thousands of firefighters on the front line, county officials needed to coordinate fire suppression efforts at multiple points.
But they ran into a major roadblock. Their wireless internet had slowed down to a crawl, making it virtually impossible to send or receive emergency communications. Verizon had throttled the internet speed to a fraction of what it was before and then refused to restore it unless the county upgraded to a more expensive data plan, after it had reached its data cap.
To put an end to these practices, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing a policy change that would restore national standards of net neutrality and bring back more consumer protections, reliability and security to broadband connections.
“I think this is an issue that makes sense to most people who have ever been online. They want to go where they want, and do what they want. They don’t want their broadband provider making decisions for them or relegating them to a slow lane and making others pay up for a fast lane,” said FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, who spoke at a news conference at the McCormack Training Center in Campbell on Monday, April 8.
The proposal to restore net neutrality rests on the reclassification of broadband internet access service as a telecommunication service. In 2017, under the Trump administration, the FCC abdicated its authority over broadband by classifying it as an information service. Since then, there has been limited federal oversight of internet service providers, leaving some states, like California, to establish their own net neutrality laws.
But it has not been enough to keep the internet open, fast and fair for everyone, Rosenworcel said. As a telecommunication service, broadband would fall under the Tier II level of the Communications Act of 1934, once again giving the FCC authority over internet service providers. The FCC plans to vote on the policy change later this month in Washington, D.C.
For Stanford University Law Professor Barbara von Schewick, net neutrality is an equity issue at its core. Without regulatory oversight, there is little the FCC can do to ensure that people have equal access to the internet. “These kinds of policies have implications beyond just, you know, can we all watch Netflix and have crystal clear quality,” she said.
Video streaming on mobile devices is notoriously bad, not because of technology, but because of different-tiered data plans designed to maximize profits, according to von Schewick. It is particularly burdensome for lower-income households that are more likely to use mobile cell phone plans as their only internet connection. Access to job, health and educational opportunities are limited by these inferior service plans, she said.
Dane Jasper, co-founder and CEO of Sonic, an internet and telecommunications company, also supported the net neutrality proposal, and provided a candid assessment of how service providers exploit customers, particularly in situations of a market monopoly.
“I think in a monopoly or duopoly environment. It’s clear that a carrier can further monetize customer behavior through limiting the speeds of service to charge more for higher speeds, limiting the capacity to charge more for overage or additional use, or by favoring certain applications that benefit their bundled services,” he said.
Net neutrality would protect consumers from these kinds of practices, Rosenworcel said, and restoring federal oversight will bring other benefits too. It would require companies to address internet outages, increase data privacy protections and bolster cybersecurity standards.
But for Santa Clara County Fire Chief Suwanna Kerdkaew, ensuring public safety was the number one reason to back net neutrality. Since the Mendocino Complex fire, the county has strengthened its communication network with the adoption of FirstNet, a high-speed wireless broadband network created specifically for first responders. Still, more work needed to be done to ensure that firefighters would have the best infrastructure and technology available to them, covering all locations, she said.
“We go where the fires are. And if they’re in Idaho, we’ll go there. If they’re in Montana, if they’re in Texas, it doesn’t matter, it’s neighbor helping neighbor … The goal to strive toward is to have the same connectivity here, everywhere,” Kerdkaew said.
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