‘The Internet Should Be Treated as a Public Utility’

Janine Jackson interviewed Craig Aaron for the February 6, 2015, episode of CounterSpin, and Malkia Cyril for the October 1, 2014, episode, on net neutrality. The interviews were excepted for the April 28, 2017, show. | MP3 Link

Janine Jackson: If it weren’t for an open internet, how much do you think you’d know about Black Lives Matter, or NoDAPL? If it were up to private corporations to determine which websites you can access and which you can’t—based on which ones pay them—what are the odds that you’d be able to keep up with the activist campaign against Wells Fargo, or learn how to get involved in the next climate march in your city?

There are a number of questions we don’t even ask ourselves, because—it’s the internet. But that complacency is inappropriate. If media corporations and their government enablers have their way, the space you rely on for communication, for organizing, for the ability to hear from folks who are not bought and paid for by big business will disappear.

FCC chair and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai has declared in a closed door event bankrolled by the telecom industry — surprise, surprise — that he plans to eliminate the FCC’s legal authority to enforce the net neutrality rules that grassroots activists fought for and won just two years ago. It’s far from a done deal, but the fight is on.

We’ve talked many times on CounterSpin about what net neutrality means, not just for individuals but for movements, and how the last thing we want to do is leave it to the experts. In February 2015, when the FCC was on the verge of establishing net neutrality, we talked to Craig Aaron, president of the group Free Press.

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Craig Aaron: Yeah, this is—I’m still pinching myself, but this is the real thing, real net neutrality. The key element in what the FCC is proposing, finally, after years and years of advocacy, is doing what’s called reclassifying broadband under Title II of the Communications Act. And that’s sort of the wonky, legal way to talk about the FCC having the authority to protect internet users, and actually be able to step in when a big phone or cable company abuses their near-monopoly power.

Janine Jackson: So what is Title II? What is this reclassification, from what to what?

CA: Title II is a part of the Communications Act, the laws that govern all of our communications networks. And sort of the whole problem we’ve had with the FCC, that created this net neutrality issue, was that back during the Bush administration, they changed how broadband was treated under the law. So instead of treating it as part of what’s called Title II—which just means you treat it as a telecommunications service, or a two-way communication service, services like the phone that allow me to talk to you and you to talk to me—they treated it more like an information service, which was a set of regulations that applied to things like websites or the Lexis/Nexis searches, and things like that.

So we had a problem where in an effort to deregulate, and really to keep the cable industry from having to share its lines, the FCC sort of threw out the baby with the bathwater, and created this big mess around net neutrality. The important thing they’re poised to do right now is fix that original problem, and actually make sure that the important principles that have always been part of our communication system, always been a part of two-way communication networks, actually carry forward into the internet age.

JJ: Well, the argument against reclassification, the industry argument, has been that it would discourage investment. Wheeler seems to be saying that that’s just not going to hold water.

CA: Yeah. I think that in the process of this fight, he’s realized that those claims are really garbage. And the strongest evidence of that is that when these companies, when they’re in Washington, DC, they love to go and talk to policymakers about how any kind of regulations or responsibilities are going to lead to diminishing investment, even as they’re raking in 90 percent profit margins on cable modems and things like that. But the fact is, when these same companies actually go to Wall Street and actually talk to investors, they’re very clear, and legally obligated to acknowledge, that there is no real anticipated impact on investment. And if anything, having an actual even playing field online is going to benefit the larger economy, and obviously certainly, our larger democracy, and the social benefit of having a lot of competing voices, and not just whatever Comcast or AT&T decides you should be able to see or watch.

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Janine Jackson: In August of 2014, Ferguson, Missouri, of course was the headline. The killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by local police, and the issues it raised about racist state violence, weren’t anything corporate media were interested in. They were forced to attention by social media, where people were not just calling out the corporate press, but talking around them. It may not have felt like the moment was about media per se, but Malkia Cyril of the Center for Media Justice explained the connection.

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Malkia Cyril: The lingo Black Twitter isn’t about the company at all. It’s about the hundreds of black blogs, independent black blogs and black bloggers, websites, individual pundits that use the social media platform to microblog and talk about what they see as the primary issues affecting black communities. And one of the reasons that’s so important is because these journalists, black journalists, have been slowly excluded and marginalized in mainstream media. The number of black journalists able to work in mainstream media has decreased over the last ten years significantly. And what we find is that both these journalists, and the community journalists that we’re talking about on Twitter, have found social media to be an outlet, to be a way to share their work in a way that wasn’t able to happen on CNN, MSNBC or any of the other cable news outlets. Because cable is owned by mega-corporations, and doesn’t allow for the kind of independent voice that a more social platform on the internet allows for.

Janine Jackson: On the one hand, you want to say it’s not the technology that’s key. I mean, media and other powers could have tried to listen to black people if they were writing on parchment, you know. But at the same time, the technology and the kind of communication that it makes possible is something different, isn’t it?

MC: Absolutely. The decentralized nature of the internet allows for a level of democratized voice that we’ve never seen. The internet as a platform, as a vehicle for voice in black communities, has become one of the most powerful ways to bypass the exclusionary and discriminatory mainstream media. And because of that, because of its decentralized and democratized nature, black people are very conscious of the need to fight to maintain their online and digital voice.

JJ: Well, let’s talk about that fight. We know that for corporate media, this story is going to go away. Every racist act in corporate media is an anecdote. We’re told that things “raise questions” when they might more appropriately be said to answer them. We hear, “gosh, this doesn’t look like America,” when it looks exactly like America. And Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote recently about the politics of changing the subject, you know, let’s talk about the black folks killing each other.

All of this is why, even when decent coverage happens, it feels like reinventing the wheel, and it points up the need for a sustained space to have a conversation that doesn’t just serve as corrective of that dominant narrative and stop there, but moves forward. So what is the state of play on the fight to have the internet be that sort of space?

MC: Right now, as the people of Ferguson are on the frontlines demanding justice for yet another murder of a young black man unarmed, black people are also on the frontlines to maintain the right to speak online about the rampant police brutality in our communities. And one of the frontlines that black people are fighting on is the fight for the open internet. Black communities across this country are saying loud and clear that they want to keep the internet open. We understand that the only way—that the court in Verizon v. FCC said, very clearly, the only way the Federal Communications Commission can enforce nondiscrimination rules online is to reclassify broadband as a Title II common carrier service.

Now, let me explain that for a minute, because people say, well, what is Title II? Title II simply means that the internet should be treated as a public utility, should be regulated like a public utility. Some organizations are concerned that if we regulate the internet as a public utility, it will kill innovation. But what black communities know very well is two things. One, public utilities, when they are truly public, are secure and reliable. So that’s No. 1. We want a reliable platform for independent voices, and treating it like a utility, regulating it as such, makes it a civil right that we can access publicly. So that’s number one.

Number two, some organizations and individuals have been concerned that if we treat the internet like a public utility, that a future FCC Commission, a future Congress, will come along and take that away.

And to that I think black communities are very clear. When we fought against segregation in education, we did not accept anything less than the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. There were rulings prior to that. There were court cases for more than a decade prior to that victory. But we didn’t accept any piecemeal, half-baked legislation. We only took what was morally right and just, and that was an end to segregation in education. And that’s what we’re talking about right now. Ultimately, reclassifying broadband would ensure no segregation online, that all voices were able to join the public conversation, and that black voices in particular were able to be raised around issues like police brutality, like the incident in Ferguson, and that’s what we’re fighting for.

Civil rights organizations have long been an advocate for media as a civil rights issue. It’s only as media and telecommunications have become so lucrative, it’s only as telecommunications companies have used the buy-out of our communities as a public relations strategy, that these issues have become technocratic, wonky and separate from the core issues of social justice. What Ferguson shows us, what it showed me, is that in fact there is no path to victory, to change, without the visibility and representation that media provides. And that media, as long as that media is owned, operated and controlled by the largest internet service providers, the largest cable companies, the largest private families, the black voice is in jeopardy. And if the black voice is in jeopardy, black freedom is in jeopardy.

And that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re not fighting for some back-end, technical, technocratic issues. We’re fighting for the cause of black freedom. We’re fighting for the same cause that all the black newspapers right after slavery were fighting for. We’re fighting for an end to any kind of past system, to any kind of system that violates or limits our voice. And that is what we’re talking about here today. It’s not about media policy, it’s about real justice.

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Janine Jackson: You can get more information—for now—online at freepress.net and at CenterForMediaJustice.org. And you can sign the petition to the FCC from the Media Action Grassroots Network at MAG-Net.org.

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