A growing unrest in the US portal market, constant lobbying and the fact that the FCC is now planning to hold a series of meetings to discuss the subject, have all made a climate that is ripe for the creation of a Net Neutrality law in the US that will be the envy of the rest of the world, and the blueprint for a global standard piece of legislation, akin to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
So a move by Congressman Edward Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunication and the Internet, to introduce his own crafted Internet Freedom Preservation Act, may fall on more fertile ground than his last efforts two years ago.
Markey made the following introductory statement, ‘The global leadership in high technology the United States provides stems directly from historic policies that have ensured that telecommunications networks are open to all lawful uses and to all users. In addition, because of the vital role that broadband networks and the Internet fulfill in exercising our First Amendment rights to speak, it is important that the United States adopt a policy endorsing the open nature of broadband networks.
The Act is designed to promote Internet freedom for consumers and content providers adding into law the notion that consumers and content providers should be free to send, receive, access and use all lawful applications, content, and services on broadband networks and it breaks into three key elements. The first is some additional wording added in a new section of the Communications Act, including protection of freedom to use the Internet, without unreasonable interference; the need to keep the Internet as a force in the US economy; to preserve the open nature of broadband networks and adopt baseline protections to guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism based on source, ownership, or destination.
The second element is a bill to give the FCC the job of assessing broadband services and consumer rights including policing the changes to the Communications Act, and whether or not broadband providers are allowed to add charges for services that are inconsistent with the bill’s expression of Internet free principles, and to check that policies for prioritizing particular Internet traffic are consistent with such principles.
The third element is for the FCC to hold eight public broadband summits over the next year to get comments on the effectiveness of the bill and to look for any changes that it needs and report them back to Congress to make amendments.
The bill flies in the face of big Internet ISPs from the RBOCS and the Cable operators, but this time, it is not weakly or poorly worded, it is not a closed piece of legislation which changes fundamental rights by accident (as the DMCA was) and it has a feedback loop in-built for the FCC to make adjustments through process of law. As such it is fairly wise and potentially a sane piece of legislation.
This has a genuine chance of making it into the US statute books and then being copied across the civilized world to provide some genuine protection for the internet. Operators everywhere however will want amendments to say they can block P2P traffic, but it is likely that they will only get the go ahead if they can prove that it is illegal in nature, and that there will placed a new onus of legal proof upon them.