EFFecting Digital Freedom

by Jason Kelley

The ISP Chokehold on Internet Access Must End

Wish that you had more choices for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), or a choice at all?  Or maybe you're one of the few, lucky Americans who have a choice in high speed Internet access, and have picked a smaller, more privacy-protective company that has guaranteed not to prioritize specific data, or to block or throttle your service.  Or maybe you've considered building your own Internet service provider to sell better service yourself.

Unfortunately, if the big ISPs get their way at the FCC in 2019, all of these scenarios - including that local Internet service provider you might already have - could all get a lot more expensive or flat out disappear.  And improvements in Internet speed, new infrastructure construction across America, and new choices for access are likely to be stymied as a result.

But what's beneficial for Americans - from Internet access choice to consumer privacy protections - isn't what the big ISPs want, and they're just getting started.  First, Congress repealed broadband privacy protections in March of last year, giving Comcast and other cable and telephone companies who want to sell records of our online activity the ability to do so.  By December, the FCC had voted to end net neutrality provisions - just another step towards the big ISPs' goal of cementing themselves as the gatekeepers to an open Internet.  On one side were those big ISPs and three of the five FCC commissioners,who wanted to remove rules that kept networks neutral.  On the other side were people hoping to stop ISPs from throttling or blocking service - technologists, small, customer-focused ISPs, consumers, EFF, and dozens of other digital advocacy groups.

We lost those fights then, and that means that an enormous majority of Internet users can no longer be confident that their ISPs will remain neutral in how they send them data, and in protecting their data from being sold to third-parties.  We're still pushing to regain net neutrality through Congress and in the courts, and states across the U.S. are introducing privacy bills and net neutrality bills, and we're hopeful.

But having tasted blood, big ISPs are now spoiling for another fight.  Under their trade association, US Telecom, they're petitioning the FCC to end a requirement that helps increase the number of ISPs you have to choose from.  Right now, those regulations require established telephone companies to share their copper infrastructure (fiber was excluded from the regulation as a favor to Verizon Fios) at established, affordable rates with new competitors, essentially making it possible for those small ISPs to exist.  At the moment, copper is what most Internet providers rely on to transmit data at the last mile, and this requirement allows new ISPs to buy space on an existing infrastructure at an affordable rate and lowers the barrier for them to compete with the big, established telecom companies.  Where the new companies appear, customers finally have a choice.  They can pick between, say, AT&T's policies and those of a smaller ISP like Sonic.

And importantly, those new ISPs offering mid-level Internet access that they get through existing copper lines can use that capital to spend on building high-speed infrastructure like fiber, and building in rural areas that need more and better coverage.  And it turns out those new ISPs are where a huge chunk of improvements to our Internet infrastructure come from.  Small and local ISPs account for nearly half of Fiber To The Home (FTTH) deployment in the last few years, and often step into gaps in the market that leave rural customers with slower access due to big ISPs' lack of willingness to upgrade.

But if they succeed in their petition, the big ISPs could charge huge amounts for access to copper lines or simply cut off new competition altogether, and we'll lose the ISPs working to improve American infrastructure.  The growing monopolization of Internet access above 25 Mbps, where more than half of Americans have only one choice, will become worse.  This will not only further the chokehold on Internet access choice, it will leave many Americans unable to utilize future advances in Internet services and applications.

The Internet is more than just the content that we host on our servers and the computer we use to interact with that data.  It's more than streams of information flying from port to port, and it's more than a bunch of 0s and 1s translated into information.  It's made possible by the physical equipment that we use to move that data from one place to another - the copper wire, coaxial lines, cell towers, fiber optic cables, and LAN cords - and the speed at which that equipment operates has an enormous impact on our experience of it.  If our access remains stagnant and monopolized by a few companies, it could leave us experiencing an Internet that's quite different from the Internet in other parts of the world.

America is stuck at 85 percent of people having access to the low speed of 25 Mbps, and the same percent have no or only one choice when it comes to Internet speeds above 100 Mbps.  The European Union, meanwhile, is mostly on track to meet goals of providing everyone with access to 30 Mbps Internet by 2020, with at least half of the E.U. being wired for 100 Mbps and higher.  Almost everyone in South Korea has access to fiber.  Thirty-nine percent of rural Americans still lack access to middle-level Internet service - and only ten percent of Americans have access to high-speed Internet through fiber optics.  If the big ISPs get their way, America's high-speed monopoly will continue to have an enormous, and detrimental, impact on the Internet we know and love.

EFF has submitted comments to the FCC reminding them of the importance of competition in the high-speed Internet access market, and the importance of focusing on building out our infrastructure.  We're hoping the FCC denies U.S. Telecom's petition, and actively explores ways to pressure the industry to deploy fiber to the home.  Big ISPs know we'll all take bad Internet over no Internet.  That's part of why there is a complete absence of nationwide FTTH deployment plans from any of the major ISPs, even after the Restoring Internet Freedom Order ended net neutrality, which many ISPs claimed was stopping them from building out infrastructure, and after the ISPs were given billions in additional corporate profits thanks to the tax cuts from Congress.

The big ISPs might have (temporarily) won the fight against net neutrality and privacy.  We can't let them win the fight over competition choice, too.