The Fairness Doctrine and net neutrality, natural partners

I've said many times that net neutrality regulations are tantamount to the Fairness Doctrine, an old law wherein the government determined what amounts to "fair speech". Dennis Kucinich, with the help of two FCC commissioners, has now made this explicit:

In addition to media ownership, the committee is expected to focus its attention on issues such as net neutrality and major telecommunications mergers. Also in consideration is the "Fairness Doctrine," which required broadcasters to present controversial topics in a fair and honest manner.

As a reminder, net neutrality legislation aims to regulate how Internet traffic flows over private networks. That traffic is, of course, your speech.

Similarly, net neutrality rhetoric often mentions "fairness", but the real goal is advantage for certain (for-profit) organizations at the expense of other organizations, their constituents, and their customers. The government picks winners, in other words. The ultimate loser is the public, in the form of diminished freedoms and a less dynamic media marketplace.

Here is a reminder of the bad old days under the Fairness Doctrine:

This doctrine grew out of concern that because of the large number of applications for radio station being submitted and the limited number of frequencies available, broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. [...]

The fairness doctrine ran parallel to Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1937 which required stations to offer "equal opportunity" to all legally qualified political candidates for any office if they had allowed any person running in that office to use the station. The attempt was to balance--to force an even handedness. Section 315 exempted news programs, interviews and documentaries. But the doctrine would include such efforts. Another major difference should be noted here: Section 315 was federal law, passed by Congress. The fairness doctrine was simply FCC policy. [emphases mine]

In other words, the Fairness Doctrine grew out of a perception of scarcity of media outlets, based on limited radio frequencies. To say that this is an antiquated concept in a time of several-hundred-channel cable TV, satellite TV, satellite radio, and of course our little Internet, is to state the obvious. And yet, such regressive concepts are held in high esteem by folks like Kucinich.

Further, the Fairness Doctrine was enacted by the unelected FCC, above and beyond laws passed by Congress. If it were simply one elected official advocating this idea, we might not be so worried. But joining him are two current FCC commissioners who share his enthusiasm:

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps was also on hand at the conference and took broadcasters to task for their current content, speaking of "too little news, too much baloney passed off as news. Too little quality entertainment, too many people eating bugs on reality TV. Too little local and regional music, too much brain-numbing national play-lists." Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein also spoke at the event.

You read that right. Mr. Copps believes he is in a position to determine what there is "too much" and "too little" of on TV. Perhaps you can sense his hand on your remote.

Let's be clear: net neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine are two sides of the same coin, which is government regulation of speech. If anyone can explain to me how this comports with the First Amendment, I am all ears.

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Not surprisingly, the Daily Kos loves the idea. After all, free speech only makes sense so long as we all agree, right?

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Hello Slashdotters, welcome. If you have the patience, here are some extended rants on the subject, just keep scrolling.

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Captain Ed has more. What is interesting is that most media leans left-of-center. If the Fairness Doctrine were enforced, might we see a little more balance toward the right? But then again, with gov't making the rules, "fair" is fair game.

Comments

[Alistair Hutton]

Matt you're still missing the issue.

There currently exists a tiered internet service and it works very nicely. Comsumers pay a variable amount of moeny to get a variable amount of bandwidth, whilst content providers also pay a variable amount of price for a variable amount of bandwidth.

That is as non-neutral as it comes. And it is good. Neutral doesn't mean that everyone is the same.

It's this mysterious third charge that the backbone providers want to introduce that has us in a kerfuffle, they wish to examine the contents (absolutely definetely the VoIP packets) of the packets and charge based on that.

To pull in the inneffective real-world analogy, the backbone provders are the road owners. The comsumers and web site owners have paid delivery companies to send and recieve information and the delivery companies pay the road owners to send their trucks on them containing the information. Nice, standard sized trucks all at a standard weight and performacne charateristics. Now, the road owners want to open up the trucks and examine what's inside them to decide how much to charge. But that's not the problem, it's odd and annoying given that a lot of effort has gone into making the trucks uniform but it's not the problem. No the real problem, and this is where it gets offensive, is that they want to charge variable amounts of money for each truck depending on where it's going to and where it's come from EVEN THOUGH THOSE LOCATIONS ARE OUTSIDE THE BACKBONE PROVIDER'S ROAD NETWORK. That breaks the internet.

Imagine if when you used a toll road you were charged not for the distance you travelled on the road but where you came from and where you were going to. That is, as they say, the crazy talk.

[Bman21212]

This doctrine grew out of concern that because of the large number of applications for radio station being submitted and the limited number of frequencies available, broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. [...]

The fairness doctrine was simply FCC policy. [emphases mine]"

The FCC grew out of the same concept. There were a limited number of stations. Yet, we still have TV regulated for content in terms of violence, but even more so in terms of sex. We cant switch a channel? I think in both cases, we can. The extra regulations just cost money, and limit choices.
However, somehow, many republicans are for the increase in FCC power, and against The Fairness Doctrine.

[mark]

Supposedly the media a few decades ago (when there was a fairness doctrine) was of much higher quality, they were more professional and actually served as a fourth estate. I'm not sure the fairness doctrine would be best, but we would be much better served if we had some measures in place for broadcast media. Perhaps limit consolidation, break up media monopolies, and have some system where they could be fined or sued for demonstrably false information.

[mark]

Well, of course net neutrality abuses haven't happened yet, the ISPs have yet to implement their tiered scheme until the government decides once and for all. That's like if someone wanted to pass a law saying no internet connection can be faster than 56 kbps saying, "See, there's no evidence this will slow down the internet, so it must only be in your imagination," because it hasn't actually been passed yet.

Also, I don't understand why you Republicans trust companies like AT&T and Verizon so much with the future of the Internet. These are the companies that don't seem to have either the interest or competence to seriously upgrade their networks for a large number of people, resulting in the US falling way behind technologically. Furthermore, they've proven they don't care about either their customers' privacy or the Constitution (with the NSA, exploitative terms of service, and other, scandals). Nearly every time the government has further deregulated the telecom market, they've increased prices when they could. Simply put, there's absolutely no reason to think this will benefit the public in any way. Do you honestly think they've spent $700 million+ on lobbying for our benefit?

I only wish you conservatives cared about real liberty violations like the NSA scandal, GOP politicians talking about limiting free speech, and the patriot act, as much as you do the so-called "free market" and the right of large corporations to screw America.

[mark]

One other thing it's an outright lie by the the telecoms that net neutrality is necessary to improve the Internet. In countries like South Korea and Japan, they have much faster and better internet connections than we do (like 100 mbps and more), and they have net neutrality as well other measures to protect consumers and competition. In fact, the only reason we supposedly "need" net neutrality for things like video service is because the AT&T, Verizon,etc. don't want to actually upgrade their networks, which is why the whole thing's a scam.*

I notice people say, well it's their network, so can't they do whatever they want with it? The implication is that the phone companies built it all by themselves with their money. Well, it was started with tax-payer's dollars (darpanet), and the government gave the telcos a large amount of money (from us) to build it.* You could even say companies like AT&T are government-sponsored monopolies. So it's only logical the public has a say in this, it's not "their" network. The problem is Republicans want it both ways, they want to give their business buddies billions of dollars in taxpayer's money, but then they want them to be able to do whatever they want with no oversight.

Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, has studied this issue and strongly supports net neutrality. Of course he's more qualified than Bill Gates, who didn't invent the internet or (arguably) the "innovations" of Microsoft. The most these "experts" seem to say are more vague statements like "Well anything that hampers innovation is bad.. We need an open internet" (Well, of course). It almost leads one to believe either they weren't really talking about net neutrality, or it was mentioned to them and they just said that without looking into it, it was out of context.

*please see:
www.newnetworks.com
www.teletruth.org
These sites document many telco abuses, including how in the 90s they were given $200 billion from taxpayers on the condition they would roll our high-speed fiber optic networks with speeds of at least 45 mbps both ways. They then however kept the money and reneged on their promise. This is detailed in the book "The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal" but also on the sites above. The CEOs won while the rest of us lost.

[Paul THurman]

There is no fairness in this doctrine whatesoever. Period! Only if Airamerica did better we would not be having this debate!