INDIANAPOLIS – This is the last day the Federal Communication Commission is taking public comments on a controversial plan that could change how the Internet works. The idea of letting some deep-pocketed broadband providers divide bandwidth into “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” and charge more for the faster speeds has faced a public backlash. Timothy Karr is senior director with the group Free Press.
“An organization called the Sunlight Foundation looked at public comments to the FCC and there have been more than a million already,” Karr says. “They found 99 percent of those comments were in support of net neutrality, so this is an issue where the public is strongly unified.”
Two years ago, in opposition to legislation involving copyrights, many websites took part in a partial blackout of the Internet, with some, like Wikipedia, shutting down completely for a day. Last Wednesday there was a symbolic slowdown in protest of the threat to a free and open Internet.
A national coalition of rural broadband advocates, the Rural Broadband Policy Group, wants the FCC to treat Internet access like phone service as a common carrier, what’s known as a Title II service, says Whitney Kimball Coe coordinator, National Rural Assembly, Center for Rural Strategies.
“It would uphold net neutrality and secondly, it would close the ‘digital divide,'” Coe says.
By “digital divide,” she explains, the FCC currently considers Internet access a Title I service which means there are fewer regulations for Internet providers. Coe says that means providers don’t have to “build out in rural places,” leaving some people with bad service or no service.
Coe says of the 19-million Americans who don’t have Internet access, more than 14-million are rural Americans.
“Rural America already feels like it’s out of sync with that sort of American idea of equal opportunity,” says Coe. “In the political sector, rural America feels like it’s not being heard.”
Coe says that leaves a simple message to the FCC from rural broadband advocates, “Don’t break the Internet before rural America gets it.”
Mary Kuhlman
