Court Tosses Rules of Road for Internet

by  Gautham Nagesh; Amol Sharma; Ryan Knutson; et al., The Wall Street Journal 

Federal Regulations on ‘Net Neutrality’ Are Voided, Clearing Way for New Fees

A U.S. appeals court has rejected U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules mandating equal treatment for all Internet traffic by broadband providers, striking a blow against net neutrality and raising the possibility that bandwidth-hungry websites might be assessed a fee to ensure quality service.

The court determined that the FCC imposed the same types of requirements on broadband providers as they did on traditional common carrier telecommunications services, even though the commission chose not to classify broadband as a telecom service. FCC chairman Tom Wheeler says he is opposed to regulating broadband Internet in the same way as the landline phone system.

Consumers may consequently face tiered Internet service, receiving some content at full speed while other sites take longer to load–or are degraded in quality–because owners opted not to pay the toll.

Analyst Tony Wible says some of the onus of paying for Internet infrastructure could be passed on to content providers or consumers in the form of usage-based billing. He said Internet companies would mount a fight to avoid paying new fees, but  it was inevitable that over time some of the burden of paying for Internet infrastructure to handle bulging traffic would shift to content providers or consumers in the form of usage-based billing.

“You need to put forth an economic model to finance that investment,” he said. “The question is over the price point and who is going to set it.”

The ruling also poses a dilemma for the FCC and President Barack Obama, who has pushed for equal treatment of Internet traffic going back to his first presidential campaign.

If the appeals court’s ruling stands, it could seriously hobble the business models of content providers and raise costs for consumers. Columbia University law professor Tim Wu says the ruling “takes the Internet into completely uncharted territory.”    Full Article

DCL: The Internet has become a backbone of our modern society.  It would seem that this ruling covers all forms of event processing infrastructure, including the Mobile world, since the FCC has classified them as an information service and not as communications infrastructure. The FCC needs to revisit its classifications.  The politics of big business has played a role in this ruling.  Make your thoughts and wishes known to your political representatives. This is a ruling that will affect your way of living.  We may need new laws to govern the way our communications infrastructure is run.  Note that Netflix and Google declined to comment for the WSJ article.

See also the excellent New York Times article “Back to the Digital Drawing Board”: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/opinion/back-to-the-digital-drawing-board.html?ref=opinion