Civil Rights Groups Divided On Net Neutrality

HughPickens.com writes: Edward Wyatt reports at the NY Times that the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition have sent representatives, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, to tell FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that they think President Obama's call to regulate broadband Internet service as a utility would harm minority communities by stifling investment in underserved areas and entrenching already dominant Internet companies. "We got a lot of poor folks who don't have broadband," said Jackson. "If you create something where, for the poor, the lane is slower and the cost is more, you can't survive." "I think we're all on board with the values embedded in what President Obama said, things like accelerating broadband deployment and adoption," says Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and a member of the group including Mr. Jackson that met with the F.C.C. chairman. "The question is, will we be able to solve these issues by going so far with stringent regulation?"

Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers, like the Comcast Foundation, the charitable organization endowed by Comcast. But those organizations say that the donations or sponsorships do not influence their positions. "We get support from people on all sides of the issue, including Google and Facebook," says Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "We don't let any of them influence our position." For it's part, the NAACP says its formal policy position is that the NAACP neither endorses, nor opposes the formally defined concept of net neutrality but supports the need to particularly focus on underserved racial and ethnic minority and poor communities, while highlighting the importance of protecting an open internet.

Comments

Shakedown

[fizzer06]

Give Jackson money and he'll go away.

Re:Shakedown

[Imsdal]

You are missing the fact that Net Neuttrality hinders the development of alternative business models. This is bad for everyone, but especially bad for customers who are least well served by the mainstream alternative. This is pretty much exacty poor people.

Net Neutrality is only needed because of the last mile monopoly. Remove that and no one would have thought of the idea of NN for a second. You don't like the practices of your local ISP? Well, get another one, then. As long as there is a last mile monopoly, the situation isn't ever going to be good (for consumers - it's excellent for monopolists!). Fight that instead!

This is also, not coincidentally, why the NN debate is much less intense (in fact, almost non-existent) in Europe.

Re:Shakedown

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Aside from the groups that are merely clueless or for sale, the major argument involves a little careful wordplay about what 'internet access' will actually mean as well as some careful dodging of inconvenient questions concerning prices.

Given the present cost of providing service and accepted margin, there are a variety of areas and people who don't end up with internet access, mostly urban poor and rural. The theory is that, without net neutrality, various exciting new business models (mostly variations on shaking down existing internet activity for more money; but never you mind that...) will be possible, which will make it economic to provide service to the currently underserved. Don't, of course, ask why this change would lead to more access in shitty areas, rather than continued non-access in those areas and higher prices elsewhere, or inquire as to whether an internet built on shaking down businesses looking to reach customers might be wildly in favor of incumbents...

It is also quite likely that, in terms of understanding and the people involved, there's a lot of holdover from the assorted minority-interest/minority-owned radio and TV battles. With the exception of the people who are simply too young to have been involved, those are the areas were people concerned with lack of minority access to culturally relevant communications systems are likely to be coming from; but, inconveniently, those areas really lead to a number of nasty misunderstandings: "Internet" isn't especially similar to broadcast media. People who come at the problem from a background in scrabbling over broadcast media seem to fall fairly readily into one of several traps.

Most obviously, the temptation seems to be to fall into notion that 'internet access' is more or less a binary thing, possibly with some understanding of 'broadband' vs. 'not broadband'. In this case, the ISP strategy is to promise some additional coverage of uneconomic customers at cheap rates(often with a raft of fine print limitations and for a limited time, because it's a screwjob rather than a good faith offer) if they are allowed to get their way with customers who have enough money to be worth squeezing. If your background is campaigning for access on behalf of those without access, this looks fairly attractive. Unfortunately, you end up being the least-valued customers of an even worse oligopoly ISP at an overall cost that is likely to be higher than just outright subsidizing the additional households that actually ended up getting service.

Re:Shakedown

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Give Jackson money and he'll go away.

This. Remember when beer distributorships were harming minority communities by entrenching already dominant companies? And then Jackson's kids mysteriously ended up owning a distributorship or two...and suddenly all was well? http://www.martinlutherking.or...

Re:First Do No Harm

[Jane Q. Public]

What problem will be solved RIGHT NOW by passing strict regulations for ISP's to abide by?

The fact that the United States is something like 26th of industrialized countries in average internet bandwidth, AND more expensive than even those that have far better service.

The big ISPs haven't been investing in infrastucture, because they haven't had to. They don't compete. In 80% of the United States, people have only one real choice for low-latency, modern broadband.

Instead, they've just been pocketing their insane profits.

You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.

It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.

(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)

I don't get it

[Radical Moderate]

As far as I know, most minorities have access to electricity, water, and telephones. But treating internet like a utility will somehow keep it out of the inner city? And the free market will soon be bringing low-cost internet to the poor that's just as good as the overpriced connection I pay for? What planet do these guys live on?

Re:I don't get it

[Roger Wilcox]

I've been convinced for some time now that Jesse Jackson and his ilk do not truly represent the people they claim to stand for. Their position on this issue makes absolutely no sense.

The only feasible explanation I can imagine is that they are abusing the trust of the gullible in an attempt bring the force of public opinion down against Title II designation for broadband.

Title II seems the sanest answer available for our current situation, as we have seen it succeed at reigning in other natural monopolies for 80 years at this point. Why this push didn't come 15 years ago is a mystery to me.


Aside: the fact that this is part of the conversation all of a sudden means that the man behind the propaganda curtain is now actively trying to influence *your* thoughts on the issue. Watch carefully to see how they paint this across the media.