Scott Latham, associate professor and vice provost for innovation and workforce development at University of Massachusetts Lowell, joined Boston Herald Radio’s “The Rundown” to talk about the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality.
Q: If you could give us your reflection on the move to remove the Net Neutrality rules by party line with this FCC Commission.
A: The FCC voted to repeal the Net Neutrality protections that were passed in 2015 … right across party lines, three Republicans voted for, two Democrats against. …
What Net Neutrality says is that basically the internet service providers, the Comcasts of the world, the Verizons of the world, can’t embed into their business models preferential pricing or data treatment.
So if you’re the average Joe or Sally you get your data the same way that someone at a company gets their data. And Net Neutrality I think is important, at least in principle, because it keeps the internet open for everyone, and that’s a larger policy debate that we can have.
And so now with Net Neutrality being removed, what we’re likely to see happen is the power in the internet industry is going to shift from the content providers, like Facebook, Google, Netflix to Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. I don’t think that people will see a big change over night, I know they won’t, they probably won’t see a change in a year or so, but at some point you’re probably going to see something called “paid prioritization” … that an internet service provider, like Comcast, could make a formal agreement to give data speeds and data access a higher priority to people that pay more … at some point you’re going to start to see a pay-to-play internet and I think that’s problematic.
Q: So the counterargument here is that the FCC should have never put these rules in place, that they hinder innovation and that they hinder the ability to provide other services or whatnot.
A: If you think about it, the internet service provider, in effect what they do is they provide plumbing; they provide the same type of service that brings water to your house, that brings electricity to your house. … Going back five, 10 years, you’ve seen four internet service providers, Comcast, Charter, AT&T and Verizon, go from controlling about half of the broadband access to over two-thirds. So the market has changed, these companies are much more powerful and removing the Net Neutrality protections, we’re putting more power into those four companies at the expense of consumer protections.
