It seems like everyone who is talking about net neutrality today worries that we’re not talking enough about net neutrality. They’re right. So, allow me to add mine to the choir of voices warning about Federal Communications Commission Chairman (and former Verizon lawyer) Ajit Pai‘s plan to dismantle the free and open flow of digital information by, in his own words, “taking a weed whacker to current net neutrality rules.”
Back in 2015, which seems eons ago now, proponents of equal access to an Open Internet won a historic victory when the FCC reclassified the Internet as a public utility. What that means for you and I is that big phone and cable companies (and their lobbyists) were subject to federal oversight and regulation with regard to how they did business. If anyone reading this now is a member of the Greatest Generation, first, bravo! and, second, this should sound familiar, as the FCC’s net neutrality rules are more or less a reapplication of the depression-era Title II rule intended to regulate the AT&T/Ma Bell monopoly. Title II prevents Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) from stratifying our access to information by creating “fast” and “slow” lanes through paid prioritization.
If you still don’t quite get all the ins and outs of how net neutrality works, I recommend taking a look at John Oliver’s excellent summary. (It’s about 20 minutes.) In what follows, I won’t explain it in any more detail. I’m more interested in convincing you that denial of free and equal access to the internet is as much of a “health” crisis for our nation as the denial of free and equal access to medical care is.
In fact, there are number of very easy parallels that can be drawn between our current medical care crisis and the sort of crisis that would certainly be brought about should a commitment net neutrality be abandoned by the FCC. For example, we’ve heard the GOP leadership, arch opponents of the Affordable Care Act (and of universal, single-payer health care), protest that repealing ACA is not tantamount to “denying” anyone access to healthcare. This is, of course, a ridiculous argument; if you cannot afford a commodity, it is useless (and, in this case, cruel) to point out that you could buy it. Similarly, opponents of net neutrality argue that paid prioritization would not “deny” anyone access to the internet. But the truth is that it would effectively “raise the price” of access to websites and services that don’t pony up, making them more or less incapable of capturing the attention of users. And attention is to the internet like air is to the human body.
Another parallel: Republicans argue that mandatory universal health insurance coverage (and federal regulation, more generally) stifles competition, discourages innovation, lowers the quality of goods and services, and hurts business. This argument is just a specific variation on generic, capitalist, market logic, which takes as its first principles that everything has a price, that the price of labor should be as low as workers can survive, and the price of goods should be as high as consumers can bear. (Of course, the price of labor is lower than humans can survive, as we see in minimum wage, and the price of some goods are much higher than the market can bear, as we see in tuition costs.) Opponents of net neutrality parrot this logic in many of the same ways, and it is true that the internet would produce more profit for telephone and cable companies if they instituted paid prioritization, though it should also be noted that there is zero evidence that net neutrality regulations stifle competition, discourage innovation, or lower the quality of goods and services. I mean, see: the internet.
The root problem here is that right-wing, pro-business, neoliberal logic refuses to grant that anything can or should be free. And I mean “free” in both the libre sense (“free as in speech”) and the gratis sense (“free as in beer”). Medical care ought to be free in the libre sense and, despite the protests of Big Insurance and Big Pharma to the contrary, could be free in the gratis sense. Why? For the most basic of moral reasons, namely, that these corporeal coils that we carry our minds around in are mercurial, vulnerable, susceptible to all sorts of natural and social assault, and we need them to live. Human beings ought not have to “afford” life. Human beings want to live.
Information wants to be free.
When Stewart Brand first forwarded the hypothesis above in the late 60’s, he did so in the course of an argument for how technology could be liberating rather than oppressive. But Brand coupled it with a competing hypothesis– “information wants to be expensive, because it is so valuable”– and, in doing so, both anticipated and validated the exploitative and oppressive logic of the attention merchants to come. We need not grant that information wants to be expensive, I propose, any more than we need to grant that medical care “wants” to be expensive. The only people who want anything to be expensive are those who profit. And it is those profiteers who have manufactured two of the greatest “health” crises of our current democratic state: one crisis threatens the life of the mind, and the other threatens the life of the body.
Here is where my analogy reaches its limits. Although I flatly reject Brand’s claim that information “wants to be expensive” on the same grounds that I would deny a similar claim about medical care, I nevertheless agree with his claim that information “wants to be free” in a way that I think cannot be said of medical care. At the risk of stepping out onto thin metaphysical ice here, I believe that it is in the very nature of information– especially information of the digital ilk, which is literally written into the order of the Universe– to want to be free (gratis and libre). This is one reason, among others, why I believe there is no such thing as “forbidden knowledge.” Not because there aren’t some questions that, if pursued to their philosophical ends, might produce knowledge that has foreseeably pernicious consequences, but rather because the pursuit of knowledge per se cannot be forbidden. If there’s one thing eminently evident in human history, it is that if we can ask a question, we will pursue it to its end. In fact, we’re already engaged in the pursuit of its end.
Rolling back the rules that guarantee net neutrality, as Chairman Pai is proposing, will effectively negate any liberatory potential for the internet, arguably humankind’s most potentially liberatory technological innovation, Worse still, the effects of this rollback will ripple outwards to impact the kinds of information-sources that are accessible– and, thus, the kind of insights that are considered— in the development of future technologies. This can only reinforce and sediment the already-extant, oppressive socio-economic stratification generated by the (socio-economically manufactured) digital divide.
It need not be so.
If you care about net neutrality, or information, or freedom, here are some things you can do right now. First, take a look at the list of arguments against net neutrality and why they’re wrong (published by TechCrunch). Second, sign the FreePress Action Fund petition to policymakers to protect net neutrality. Third, contact your Senators and Representatives and tell them that you oppose Chairman Pai’s rollback of FCC net neutrality oversight. (Use this helpful primer for “How to Lobby Your Elected Officials on Net neutrality, Reclassification, and Internet Freedom.“) Fourth, write a letter to the Editor of your local paper.
Fifth, spread the word. Fellow educators, make it a point to work a discussion of net neutrality into your courses. There are plenty of (ethical, metaphysical, political, epistemological) inroads for talking about this issue in a Philosophy class, and it’s even easier to work into a STEM course! Talk about it on Facebook, tweet a link to this blogpost, find a way to delicately steer the conversation to net neutrality the next time you’re having a beer with friends. ProTip: use the “free speech vs. free beer” as a segue.
Finally, go guerilla.
In the words of the late Aaron Swartz (whose Guerilla Open Access Manifesto you should read post haste): “Information is power, But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves… We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need
to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open
Access.
A couple of weeks ago, Representative Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho) claimed that “nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” You may think the same is true of access to information.
You are wrong.