shouting loudly

Stevens bill: Minor 1st Am protections, no neutrality

Update: This post has been edited. Thanks to Tim Schneider for his excellent legal insight.

The new draft of the Stevens Telecom bill (pdf) features a shameless attempt to deliver just enough compromise on net neutrality to buy off political activist groups (e.g. the Christian Coalition) who are worried about being censored online. It’s not enough.

The draft adds a new Title IX, the “Internet Consumer Bill of Rights Act.” (See p. 144+) Yet Stevens’ bill still reserves for ISPs the right to pick online winners and losers in terms of speed and other quality of service measures, creating an “improved” bill that still stinks.

The new draft seems to be a minor improvement over the previous draft’s mere FCC study on the issue of neutrality. Section 902 requires that each ISP allow consumers to “access and post any lawful content of [their] choosing.” Section 904, “Application of the First Amendment,” insists:

No Internet service provider engaged in interstate commerce may limit, restrict, ban, prohibit, or otherwise regulate content on the Internet because of the religious views, political views, or any other views expressed in such content unless specifically authorized by law.

This is perhaps a 2-degree improvement over the wait-and-see approach of previous drafts, but the bill is still essentially facing backwards. On page 149, the bill tells the FCC that it may not “promulgate any regulations implementing this title,” which means that the FCC must enforce each violation anew. This is highly inefficient and a substantial hurdle to enforcement, which means this section does next to nothing.

Of course, this bill does nothing to prevent Ed Whitacre from carving monopoly profits out of content providers and, because they have no profits to carve, drowning out the noncommercial voices online.

Thanks to Stevens, broadband companies will have to deliver all legal content at some speed while pay-to-play content wizzes by in the fast lane. But the speed difference will cripple all but the richest outlets. Dialup treatment in the broadband era–or 1 Mbps treatment in the (still forthcoming) 30 Mbps era–will muffle the voices of most online speakers.