This year, the obscure tech-politics debate over whether and how we pay to use the Internet leaped into the mainstream, attracting the voices of Silicon Valley’s top brass, a late-night comedian, millions of disgruntled broadband service consumers and the president. But net neutrality’s big moment was a long time coming, with a varied group of cyber law scholars each making a push for an open Internet.
It was in 2003—pre-Facebook, Twitter and the rest—that Tim Wu first coined the term “net neutrality,” referring to the idea that Internet service providers shouldn’t be able to charge different amounts for different kinds of websites and applications. Seven years later, he, Marvin Ammori and Susan Crawford together wrote an eight-page letter to the Federal Communications Commission arguing for regulations that would prevent Internet service providers from slowing down or blocking some websites’ content while speeding up others’.The rules the FCC eventually imposed, though far from ideal in the eyes of cyber law activists, were struck down in 2014, and the FCC’s new chairman, Tom Wheeler, then proposed yet another set of rules that many saw as worse, essentially allowing for the two-tiered online system that Internet service providers were pining for.
Rallying back after this defeat, Ammori, with help from Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick, drafted another letter, this time in opposition to Wheeler’s proposal. Ammori circulated the memo throughout Silicon Valley, getting 150 signatures from the likes of Facebook and Google by lobbying big tech CEOs, while van Shewick made monthly trips from Stanford to D.C. to lobby the FCC. Ammori even encouraged David Karp, the CEO of Tumblr, to alert President Obama about the net neutrality problem during a fundraiser in New York. The tipping point was a “Last Week Tonight” segment that Ammori had supplied with facts and data for host John Oliver’s comical talking points. After intense public pressure, Wheeler relented, and is now pressing for stricter net neutrality regulations.
Read the full piece at Politico Magazine.
- Date Published:09/10/2015
- Original Publication:Politico Magazine