Matt Wood's House Testimony in Support of Title II Rules to Prevent Paid Prioritization and Restore Net Neutrality Protections
What follows is the spoken testimony by Free Press Action Fund Policy Director Matt Wood, delivered today before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.
Wood is testifying in support of restoring the Federal Communications Commission’s Title II authority to prevent online blocking, throttling and discrimination by internet access providers.
Wood’s full written testimony is available here.
Regarding “From Core to Edge: Perspective on Internet Prioritization.”
WASHINGTON — Free Press Action Fund Policy Director Matt Wood
Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology
Chairmen Blackburn and Walden, Ranking Members Doyle and Pallone, and Subcommittee members: Thank you for inviting me.
Free Press is a nonpartisan non-profit with 1.4 million members. We were founded 15 years ago to elevate people’s voices in the policy decisions that shape the media.
Today we believe that achieving racial and social justice means equitable access to technology and information. That’s why we work on Net Neutrality. We supported the strong rules recently and wrongly repealed by the FCC. We support Congressman Doyle’s resolution to restore them.
And we are not alone. Hundreds of Members have co-sponsored that resolution in the House and Senate. Thousands of businesses, organizations, and state and local officials support it too. Millions of people made their voices heard at the FCC and in these halls, first opposing repeal and then calling on you to pass the CRA.
That’s not surprising: poll after poll shows that Net Neutrality enjoys tremendous popular support across party lines.
One poll last summer showed that 72 percent of Republicans supported the 2015 rules. Another taken before December’s FCC vote found that 83 percent of all respondents opposed the repeal.
Free Press supports restoring the entire 2015 FCC order. We need more than three “bright lines” to preserve the open internet. We need FCC authority to prevent new forms of discrimination, and also to address digital divides, protect privacy, and promote competition.
Yet some people claim the paid prioritization ban is harmful. They say ISPs should be able to charge new kinds of fees, and that internet users and businesses would benefit from such new charges.
They also say this would help with last-mile congestion, without explaining its scope or accounting for the ways that networks already deal with it.
As a general matter, prioritizing rather than building capacity to solve any last-mile congestion would let ISPs profit from artificial scarcity. It would let them charge more to get through the bottleneck rather than building a bigger path. So paid prioritization is not just a solution in search of a problem. It’s a toll booth in search of a traffic jam.
ISPs’ own data shows that under Title II, both broadband investment and deployment speeds increased markedly, in rural and urban areas alike. Despite that evidence, some still insist that strong rules made ISPs invest too little. Now, funnily enough, we’re told that the rules may make ISPs invest too much by requiring them to build “excess capacity” instead of prioritizing their way out of congestion.
Whatever the investment incentives of the paid prioritization ban, discarding this rule would cause a radical change to the internet. That ban prohibited ISPs’ favoring traffic only in exchange for payment from a third party, or to benefit an ISP’s affiliated video or voice offers.
In other words, it did not ban the kinds of user-directed and application-driven traffic management techniques seemingly praised by others here today.
Those kinds of practices leave ISPs’ customers in control when it comes to choosing how to use their connections. And those customers already can and do choose to buy faster speed tiers.
They could even buy what’s called a quality of service tier – to use on applications of their choosing, and at times of their choosing.
Longstanding network protocols also can and do and make these kinds of choices neutrally. ISPs don’t need to inspect our internet traffic as they transmit it, or second-guess how to treat it.
The paid priority rule banned none of these network management techniques. It applied only if the ISP tried to make a content provider pay extra just to reach broadband customers, or just to cut in line ahead of other traffic.
People already pay for their connections. The websites and apps they visit should not suddenly be asked to do so too. So if I visit MarshaBlackburn.com or MikeDoyleforCongress.com on my home connection, those websites don’t have to pay my ISP to reach me.
Let me be clear: I’m not here to defend big edge providers from such payments. I represent internet users. But letting gatekeeper ISPs impose new tolls would distort the choices users have, and ISPs undoubtedly would get together with the largest edge providers to set the terms and prices for any such advantages.
It would be inefficient for every edge provider to have to strike such deals with every ISP in the country; and signing up for such deals means they’d be double-charged for data that ISP subscribers already paid to receive.
Academics can speculate that, in a different kind of access market, such new fees might reduce subscriber costs. They still do not explain why ISPs facing so little competition would have any incentive to lower their retail prices.
When ISP executives talk about paid prioritization, they don’t describe it as a way to reduce revenues or change their source. They talk about it as a chance to increase those revenues.
So the notion that new ISP fees might help internet users brings to mind a joke I’ve heard, about the most terrifying words in the language; but I think the most terrifying words to many people’s ears might be: “I’m from the cable company; I’m here to save you money.”
Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions.
