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Title: Anarchist Perspectives on Net Neutrality Author: CrimethInc. Date: December 15, 2017 Language: en Topics: internet, technology Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/12/15/anarchist-perspectives-on-net-neutrality-the-digital-enclosure-of-the-commons
Yesterday, the FCC voted to repeal Net Neutrality. Without those
protections, private corporations—and the class that controls them—can
shape what information is available to people according to their own
interests. Imagine a future in which the content widely available on the
internet is comparable to what you could watch on network television in
the 1980s! Today, the flows of information on the internet are almost
identical with our collective thought processes: they determine what we
can discuss, what we can imagine. But the fundamental problem is that
the internet has always been controlled by the government and
corporations.
It says a lot about the private sector that military development
produced a comparatively horizontal framework that corporate control has
rendered progressively less participatory and egalitarian.
Unfortunately, there’s no anarchist alternative, no people’s internet to
build up instead; this is the only one. State socialists have taken
advantage of this opportunity to promote nationalizing the internet,
arguing that this is an opportunity to formulate a vision of a better
future. But if we don’t want the capitalist class to control our
communication, state control of the internet doesn’t solve the problem:
it is, after all, the state that is making the move to put corporations
in control here, and the existing models for state control (think:
China) are just as oppressive. We should take pragmatic steps to defend
our rights in the current context, but a rights-based framework that
takes the state for granted as the arbiter of social issues will never
secure our freedom. If we want a truly liberating vision of a better
future, we have to think bigger.
An anarchist approach must begin by rejecting the false dichotomy
between corporate and state power. From there, we must dare to dream
about decentralized forms of infrastructure that are resilient against
top-down control. The internet, in its current form, is indeed
indispensable for participating in society; but that doesn’t mean we
should take the current form of the internet—or of society—for granted
as the best or only possible model. It was our resources, extracted from
us in the form of taxes and labor and innovation, that helped create
both in the first place. What could we create if our efforts were not
shaped by the constraints of the state and the imperatives of the
market?
Our long-term goal should be to seize back the structures that we helped
build, but we will have to transform them to make them function in our
interests—so we may as well begin experimenting with parallel structures
right now. Even reformists must recognize that doing so is practically
the only way to gain leverage on those who currently control the means
by which we communicate.
Technology is never neutral. It’s always political: it always expresses
and reinforces the power dynamics and aspirations that gave rise to it.
If engineers and programmers don’t build from a political framework with
the explicit intention of creating egalitarian relations, their work
will always be used to concentrate power and oppress people.
The last bulwark has fallen that stood between broadband providers and a
profit-driven feeding frenzy the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
On Thursday morning, the FCC, led by Republican Trump appointee Ajit
Pai, voted in a 3–2 split to repeal 2015 regulations enforcing strong
consumer protections on the provision of Internet services, popularly
known as Net Neutrality. The repeal will allow Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) to bundle Internet plans in much the same way as they
do cable plans, allowing access to certain websites only when you pay
up. In addition, it also allows ISPs to create tiered levels of Internet
access, forcing websites and content providers that have enjoyed the
benefit of an equal playing field over the past years to pay more money
in order to compete with properties owned by the cable companies
themselves.
Want to buy bandwidth from your favorite Telecommunications company,
like AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast? How about Telco Lite, with access to
Wikipedia? That’ll be $59.99/mo. Oh, you want Telco Super, with YouTube
bundled in? $79.99. You dare to ask for Netflix, a competitor to
Comcast’s own Hulu service? Sure, Telco Ultra can give you that—for the
price of $99.99.
Let us be clear: this repeal only benefits the ISPs. It allows ISPs to
use their privileged position as the proprietor of the physical
infrastructure for home Internet access to squeeze out profit from both
sides of the pipe they control—to gouge both content creators and
regular users alike. Everyone else, like 74% of Americans who favor Net
Neutrality, or the overwhelming majority of people who submitted unique
comments to the FCC opposing the repeal in the public feedback phase, be
damned.
In 2015, under the then-comissioner of the FCC Tom Wheeler, provision of
Internet access was reclassified under Title II of the Communications
Act. This meant that ISPs were regulated similarly to a utility, and
that preferential treatment could not be provided to some websites over
others. This is often referred to as an even on-ramp: when you open your
browser, you’d see the same Internet everyone else sees. You’d have the
same access to information as every other Internet user. Your ISP could
still charge you for faster access in general, just not for faster
access to particular parts of the net. Even with these regulations in
place, ISPs have been found violating them over and over again. As
recently as July, Verizon was caught throttling (read: slowing down)
Netflix videos, in violation of FCC rules. But don’t worry, Chairman Pai
says—we don’t need Net Neutrality because the ISPs will self-regulate.
Yeah, right.
Dirty tricks abounded in the lead-up to Thursday’s vote. In the
aforementioned public feedback phase, millions of fake anti-Net
Neutrality comments were submitted to the FCC website. These used
variations of phrases—slightly modified to have the same meaning but
using different words—in order to give the appearance of a unique
comment being submitted. Especially disturbing was the fact that the
comments were given under assumed names, often those of the deceased, or
of those who are alive but never themselves submitted anything. So
concerning was the practice that it prompted the NY Attorney General to
open an investigation into the identity theft of New Yorkers whose names
were used in fake comments, leading him to eventually publish an open
letter to the FCC after failing to receive any response to repeated
inquiries.
What’s important for anarchists to take note of here is that a lot of
the debate around Net Neutrality makes it seem like it pits one set of
profit-hungry companies against another. Why should we care if ISPs or
streaming services win? Let them fight each other, it doesn’t affect us.
But the reality is much more dire. Since the major broadband providers
effectively run what amounts to oligopoly control over our access to
information, they have much more direct ability to filter, throttle, and
ban outright content which they deem unacceptable or unprofitable. So,
yeah, it’s about Netflix and Youtube. But it’s also about access to
radical or anarchist content from CrimethInc. or IGD. In addition to
shaping traffic, the repeal enables your provider to actually block
content altogether. This puts our ability to create our own radical
subjectivities under an even greater threat than before.
Regulatory control by the centralized federal agencies backed by state
force is certainly no ideal to strive for, but (as is so often the case)
the state has set itself up to play the role of savior. In that role it
was holding back the forces of unmitigated private extraction of the
information landscape. But could things have been different? As
anarchists, could we have helped to shape the landscape itself in a more
decentralized, autonomous manner? Can we still? Instead of corporations
held back by state force, what would a non-corporate alternative to
Internet provision look like?
There are some radical alternatives that challenge corporate hegemonic
control over Internet provision at a very basic level. Exciting examples
of community-based approaches are taking shape in hacker spaces from
Oakland to New York in the form of mesh networks. The idea is simple:
instead of relying on the existing physical infrastructure built out by
the large telecommunications companies, we can build our own
infrastructure. We can take our home wifi routers, and program them to
talk to each other, to provide access to one another. This horizontal
communication stands in stark contrast to the usual usage of these
devices, which is mainly to facilitate access vertically, directly to
the ISP uplink. In this way, we can build an net that is created and
controlled by us. Pirate packets, jumping through the air.
The benefit for us is clear, and this is a fundamental, structural
challenge to the current state and corporate control flows. So our
challenge is twofold, both short-term and long-term. First, we must stop
the immediate, existential threat that we face with the repeal of the
most basic Net Neutrality protections, which threaten to silence our
voices. Second, we must build a structural alternative to the current
Internet, an other network, one where our voices can not be silenced by
a mere regulatory shift because no one else controls it but the
communities that comprise it themselves. A small example of this is the
mesh networks that exist today, which are fledgling but precious
examples of the prefiguration of power we wish to see.