Motherboard

You know how TV sucks? Not all of it, of course but, how probably a solid 90-percent is just sewage and last-dollar chasing and exploitation. Or how about how radio sucks too. I’ve no idea exactly how many stations there are in my Baltimore/D.C. market, but it’s a great many more than the two or three that are all at tolerable at any given time. The rest is a scorched wasteland of Mike Posner, Will.i.am, Will.i.am, and Nickleback. If you’re keeping track, that’s like two genres of music right there.

Now, imagine for just a second if the internet was like that. You open up your ironically developed-via-open-source browser and you have your NPR and a hundred or so other “clear,” fast websites. There is a large internet beyond that – in sort of the same way that there’s a whole lot of low-watt radio stations out there you don’t hear – but, for most of it, we’re talking about dial-up speeds. In this world, maintaining a popular or easily-accessible website without massive (read: corporate) investment has become impossible. Suddenly, you need venture capital not for development and promotion, but simply to get your website into a “fast” stream.

Or into the top tier of what has become a tiered internet. And a tiered internet is roughly what the FCC enshrined into its rules on Monday in the interests of – wait for it – not having a tiered internet.

The FCC has never loved itself more

“Today for the first time the FCC is adopting rules to preserve basic Internet values," trumpeted FCC Chair Julius Genachowski. By a three-to-two party line vote (Democrats, pro; Republicans, con), the board had passed a series of rules that, in brutally vague terms, tell ISPs, the web’s gatekeepers, how they can and cannot manage net traffic.

A couple of key items. First, wireless and wireline (cables-in-ground) are to be handled differently. Wireline providers piping internet into your house are allowed to “reasonably” manage network traffic to keep up service quality. Like, if Netflix is sucking up tons of bandwidth and making speeds crummy elsewhere, Comcast could “manage” that. So, yeah, Comcast could throttle your Netflix – or P2P activity – if it is deemed to be “reasonable.”

And if there’s a more subjective, open-to-abuse demand a government can issue than “reasonableness,” I have no idea.

The FCC also banned ISPs from blocking legal websites from users, which is fairly well, duh, but is also an unintentional acknowledgment that big-gun ISPs are running the market and not the other way around. Another new rule states that ISPs must be “transparent,” which means, presumably, that if Comcast is selling a faster-speed service over its lines, it has to tell you.

Note that this transparency rule doesn’t mean paid-prioritization is cool with the FCC; the FCC tepidly offers that paid-prioritization is probably/maybe/likely not “reasonable.” Rather, we’re talking about things like IPTV and services that use internet infrastructure and the internet, but aren’t the internet in the big open party sense of the internet. This is a thing that seems to be confusing a lot of folks in the blog peanut gallery. In wireline internet service, paid-prioritization is ostensibly off-limits. Meaning: some big money-having corporation can’t pay Comcast for faster wireline speeds than some other competing big money-having corporation. But, again, think of the many, many ways in which even a half-awake corporate mind can thrash a requirement of reasonableness.

The internet of the future is totally unreasonable

Wireless internet, like 3G and more-powerful emerging 4G networks, doesn’t have even a reasonable requirement, which the FCC partially rationalized by bizarrely citing the “openness” of Android phones. Providers can game bandwidth to their heart’s content and that is okay by the FCC (blocking sites is still not okay, for what’s it’s worth). What’s that you say? Your internet is still piped into a hole in your house, and so what?

Mine isn’t. For two years, I’ve used Clearwire (nee XOHM) and that’s 4G wireless internet. At home, it’s been the whole of my net experience. (That, and 3G on my phone.) I guess I was an early-adopter, but this sort of internet-delivery is something poised to be much, much bigger in the future. I won’t say it’ll dominate, but it’s not hard to imagine a time when it does. And when it does, according to the new rules, it can be totally unreasonable, a jumble of websites all paying wireless internet providers different amounts of money for different priorities of service. A sucky mess.

And that’s the tiered media I was talking about above, the heck of corporate-controlled radio and TV and, now, quite possibly your internet.

Key word: “possibly”

It’s been noted all over that FCC is treading on very dubious ground here as to whether it even has the authority to issue rules like this. Basically, the board is playing very loose with a line in the Communications Act: “[The FCC has the power to] encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans.”

So, it’s very possible, if not likely, that once these rules starting hit the courts next year, they just won’t survive. In other words, the FCC rules are probably more of a political gesture in lieu of needed legislation. Which itself seems pretty unlikely given the new Congress coming to D.C. next month and its new clique of far-right wingers. As if it needs being said, Republicans hate the idea of net neutrality. Paid-prioritization is free-market awesome in their eyes. (Hence the party line vote and a notable swell of conservative griping about the new non-rules. Michelle Malkin dissed it as “Obamacare for the Web”.)

A red herring?

I’m going to make one quick final point just because I haven’t seen it mentioned. The whole concept of (and arguments about) net neutrality and the open internet is something of a red herring. Just slightly so, but still something to consider.

That’s because the internet is not currently as open as we like to think. Bandwidth, server space, and, increasingly, protection from Denial of Service attacks are all things that cost money, and they are things required to deliver a website to a very large number of people. My dirt-cheap hosting service does not buy me what I need to run anything resembling high-traffic. In other words, there already is “paid prioritization” in effect. And one imagines that there is, actually, a much bigger frontier of paid-prioritization out there beyond that and beyond what the FCC is addressing. Sometime in the future we may be talking about how remember when the internet used to show music videos?

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.