After Net Neutrality by Victor Pickard;David Elliot Berman;

Author:Victor Pickard;David Elliot Berman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Net Neutrality in the Age of Trump

In recent history, few policies have enjoyed greater support than net neutrality. On December 12, 2017, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland released a poll showing that a large majority of Americans wanted to keep net neutrality rules in place. According to the poll, 83 percent of the respondents opposed repealing net neutrality, including 75 percent of the Republicans who were surveyed, 89 percent of Democrats, and 86 percent of independents.36 Two days later, the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality in a 3–2 party-line decision. That such a popular piece of legislation would be repealed under the aegis of a “populist” president who ran on a pledge to “drain the swamp” is something of a tragicomedy. Indeed, Donald Trump’s approach to internet and telecommunications policy is thus far largely indistinguishable from the Republican old guard.

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency on November 8, 2016, the fate of the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order was immediately imperiled. In a last-ditch effort to preserve net neutrality, a familiar coalition of advocacy organizations—including Fight for the Future, Free Press, Demand Progress, and the Center for Media Justice—coordinated the Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality on July 12, 2017. The coalition employed many of the same tactics that participants used during the Internet Slowdown Day in 2014, including temporarily changing their websites to simulate what the internet could look like without net neutrality. For example, internet users who visited Reddit on the Day of Action were greeted with a message typed in a crawling speed that read: “The internet’s less fun when your favorite sites load slowly, isn’t it?” On the top left-hand corner of the website, Redditors inserted the mildly dystopian warning: “Monthly Bandwidth Exceeded, Click to Upgrade.”37

Meanwhile, Chairman Pai took to the internet for some activism of his own. Dressed in a Santa suit and wielding a lightsaber, he starred in a bizarre video produced by the conservative news site The Daily Caller entitled 7 Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality. The video stunt was met with immediate contempt by the digital public. On Twitter, the actor who played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars film series, Mark Hamill, cracked that Pai was “profoundly unworthy [to] wield a lightsaber” because “a Jedi acts selflessly for the common man—NOT lie [to] enrich giant corporations.”38 Pai’s streak of bad publicity worsened when it was revealed that he had collaborated on the video with a producer named Martina Markota, best known at the time for having helped propagate “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and other high-ranking Democratic officials were operating a child-trafficking ring out of the basement of a dingy Washington, DC, pizzeria.39

Many of the large tech companies that were at the helm of previous actions to defend net neutrality distanced themselves from the 2017 protests. Google’s participation was limited to a short, poorly publicized blog post on its policy blog. Facebook’s

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