Commentary

Facebook, Google, Other Web Companies Urge FCC To Reject Online Fast Lanes

The largest Web companies officially came out against a proposal to allow broadband providers to create online “fast lanes” for companies willing to pay extra.

“Charging for enhanced or prioritized access -- essentially, charging to discriminate against or degrade competing content -- undermines the Internet’s level playing field,” the trade group Internet Association said on Monday in comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission. “It shifts the balance from the consumers’ freedom of choice to the broadband Internet access providers’ gatekeeping decisions.”

Members of the Internet Association include Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix and Twitter.

The trade group is asking the FCC to enact “simple, light-touch rules” regarding broadband. Specifically, the Internet Association says it favors a prohibition on discrimination, as well as blocking.

The organization goes on to criticize Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposal to allow providers to enter into “commercially reasonable” arrangements to charge content companies extra in order to ensure speedy delivery. “The online ecosystem would be far better served by clearer and more straightforward prohibitions against blocking and paid-prioritization,” the group writes.

Similar sentiments have been expressed by many other net neutrality advocates in the three months since Wheeler proposed pay-for-play fast lanes. But unlike many other neutrality proponents, the Internet Association isn't explicitly urging the FCC to reclassify broadband as a Title II service, which would be subject to common carrier rules.

Instead, the group's 25-page submission sets out policy arguments in favor of open Internet principles. As a practical matter, however, the types of rules the group wants almost certainly won't hold up in court unless the FCC reclassifies broadband as a common carrier service.

In fact, the FCC tried to impose neutrality regulations without a reclassification in 2010, when it voted to prohibit wireline providers from blocking or discriminating against content. But the FCC's 2010 open Internet order was invalidated earlier this year, largely because the FCC hadn't officially categorized broadband as a utility.

The Internet Association's comments come one day before the FCC's deadline for initial responses to Wheeler's proposal. The agency has so far received around 700,000 submissions from a broad array of organizations, consumers, companies and lawmakers.

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