Silicon Valley’s giant companies have been quiet lately on the question of whether the government should protect an open Internet, which they’ve previously argued is vital to innovation. Don’t count on them staking out a stronger position even though President Obama has stepped into the fray, and Washington looks to be gearing up for an epic battle over the rules that govern the Internet.
On Monday, Mr. Obama offered his support for a strict set of rules that, among other proscriptions, would prohibit broadband carriers from blocking online content, and would restrict them from giving priority access over their lines to companies that pay an extra fee.
In another era, the White House’s position might have elicited squeals of joy from the technology giants, which have long maintained that the future of innovation online depends on such strict net neutrality rules. But Google, which was once the industry’s most ardent supporter of net neutrality, and Facebook, which could mobilize millions of supporters through its service, both declined to comment on Mr. Obama’s position.
Obama’s Net Neutrality Plan
President Obama outlined his suggestions to maintain an open Internet and urged the Federal Communications Commission to implement “the strongest possible rules” to protect it.
Video by WhiteHouse.gov on Publish Date November 10, 2014. Photo by WhiteHouse.gov.Instead, they joined a supportive statement put out by the Internet Association, a trade group that represents a coalition of technology companies, including Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Twitter and PayPal.
The muted response was not surprising. Since January, when a federal appeals court threw out the Federal Communications Commission’s rules on net neutrality, broadband companies like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T have mounted a full-court public and legislative fight against any new round of regulations that would curb how they manage their networks. Their rival giants in the tech industry haven’t put up much of a fight.
Large Internet businesses have written a few letters to regulators in support of the issue and have participated in the back-channel lobbying effort, but they have not joined online protests, or otherwise moved to mobilize their users in favor of new rules.
Why not? They may be too big to bother with an issue that primarily affects the smallest Internet companies. And that is a shame.
The White House’s proposal is seen as the beginning of what could be a heated battle on net neutrality. Supporters are gearing up for a fierce fight at the F.C.C. and in the incoming majority-Republican Congress. In other words, it’s going to get ugly — and now, more than ever, reinforcements from tech giants would help the neutrality cause.
Net neutrality rules would keep broadband lines neutral of the Internet providers’ business interests. Say, for instance, you get high-speed Internet service from Comcast. Without strong rules, advocates say, Comcast could favor certain websites or videos on the lines coming into your home — perhaps those from TV networks it owns, or from outside companies from which it has exacted a fee for access to a special “fast lane” on the Internet.
If that were to happen, proponents of the rules say, it’s obvious which companies would suffer most: the Internet’s newest and least powerful businesses. The giants, meanwhile, would escape relatively unscathed.
“If you have bad rules, the ones who pay the price are the smallest companies,” said Julie Samuels, the executive director of Engine, a group that has been pushing for network neutrality rules. “Once you’re as large as Google or Facebook, you can afford to pay.”
For much of the year, that dynamic has been playing out. Last September, web companies in favor of net neutrality supported an effort to slow down many well-known sites in order to demonstrate how web users would be harmed if net neutrality rules were not enacted.
“Our campaign was driven by a tight consortium of mostly New York City-based companies,” said Yancey Strickler, the chief executive and co-founder of Kickstarter, which took part in the effort, joined by Etsy, Tumblr, Vimeo and Netflix, among other upstarts.
How Net Neutrality Works
The future of protecting an open Internet has been the subject of fierce debate, and potential changes to the rules by the Federal Communications Commission could impact your online experience.
Video by Natalia V. Osipova and Carrie Halperin on Publish Date May 15, 2014.But the Internet’s biggest names — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple — sat out the protest. If you pulled up Google’s search results or Facebook’s News Feed on Internet Slowdown Day, you would not have noticed anything amiss.
“I’m not sure what it is that kept the bigger West Coast companies out of this publicly, but ultimately I’m concerned with the outcome,” Mr. Strickler said. “If this campaign continues to go on, we would love to see Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon step forward to talk about the rights of their communities and the future of the web.”
Still, the campaign has been remarkably effective despite the absence of web giants.
“The fact that not every company could hide behind Google made some companies more willing to speak out,” said Craig Aaron, the president of the advocacy group Free Press. “In 2010, when Google was more out front on this, a lot of companies were willing to let them take the shots.”
Pro-neutrality organizers managed to whip up a record-setting 3.7 million public comments to the F.C.C. regarding the issue, most of them in favor of a strong proposal. They see Mr. Obama’s statement as a direct response to the outpouring of public support.
In some ways, the absence of large tech companies allowed advocates to paint the issue as something of a David versus Goliath battle. Here the broadband behemoths were not pitted against faceless Silicon Valley giants, but against little guys like Etsy and Kickstarter, as well as against their fiercely loyal users.
“Part of why we’re so active in this issue is that we are serving as a voice box for what our users want,” said Ari Shahdadi, the general counsel of Tumblr, the blogging service that was bought last year by Yahoo but still operates like a freewheeling start-up.
Consider, for instance, the pro-neutrality argument offered by Etsy, which is a marketplace for handmade items. Most Etsy sellers are women who have set up shop in their homes. “The Internet has allowed them to compete with big brands in the global marketplace, and we felt that was under threat,” said Althea Erickson, the company’s public policy director.
Ms. Erickson pointed out that Etsy makes low margins, taking just 3.5 percent of every transaction. It would not have been able to pay for priority access if broadband companies ever created a fast lane online. “And we know that speed really matters,” she said. “Delays of even fractions of a second result in dropped revenue for our users.”
In portraying the issue as a problem for their users, the smaller companies highlight the most important constituency for network neutrality: people like Etsy sellers, Tumblr bloggers and Kickstarter entrepreneurs, people who use the Internet to circumvent the world’s entrenched power structures.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and other large companies — with their tens of millions of American users — could mount similar campaigns on a wider scale.
They could, for example, explain how we’d all have lost out if broadband companies were free to block messaging apps like WhatsApp, now owned by Facebook, because it posed a threat to carriers’ exorbitant SMS-texting prices. Or how fledgling comedians on YouTube might never have been discovered if the video site, now owned by Google, had been required to pay an access fee in its earliest days.
“Their users really, really care about this issue,” said Mr. Aaron, of Free Press. “I hope they’d recognize that, as the smaller companies have recognized that. We’d welcome their support.”