Midco Promises No Changes Post-Net Neutrality Repeal; Open Internet Still Needs Legal Protection

My Internet service provider wants to get rid of net neutrality. Midco government affairs director Dan Nelson says Midco supports the Trump FCC’s impending December 14 action against the open Internet, but the company promises to keep treating customers fairly:

…Nelson says that Midco wants the rules repealed. But he says that some things won’t be different.

“The way we deal with our customers, and the way we manage your network traffic is transparent, and it won’t change,” Nelson said [Dan Santella, “A Look at What ‘Net Neutrality’ Repeal Could Mean,” KELO-TV, 2017.11.27].

Translation: Midco may favor websites and videos from the highest bidders and make customers pay more for certain content, but Midco will at least tell us exactly which content it’s favoring or throttling.

Nelson’s comment to KSFY last week was a bit fuller and clearer:

“For Midco customers, it won’t mean one single change at all. We have not throttled traffic, prioritized, blocked traffic and we don’t intent to change when the rules go away,” Midco Communications Government Affairs Director Dan Nelson said.

Nelson adds, the FCC’s new version to reverse these rules is something Midco supports.

“Midco has never done any of the violations of net neutrality that people are so fearful of. It’s never the way we acted, it’s not the way we act now and we don’t intend on changing the way we act assuming these rules are repealed,” Nelson said [“Local Effects of Proposed Changes to ‘Net Neutrality’, Free and Equal Internet,” KSFY, 2017.11.22].

In 2014, while resisting the Obama FCC’s drive toward protecting net neutrality, Midco CEO Pat McAdaragh said, “We are committed to the principles of net neutrality that will ensure an open Internet” and promised to “continue to serve our broadband customers as always by providing open and unfettered access to the Internet.”

Midco is a joint venture of Midcontinent Communications and Comcast. Comcast owns 50% of Midco. Comcast said in 2014 that it had never offered and had no plans to offer “paid prioritization”—i.e., fast lanes for wealthy clients’ web content. Now with a White House determined to undo everything Barack Obama did, Comcast is changing its language to make room for paid prioritization.

Midco and Comcast apparently to make America’s Internet look like Portugal’s, where ISPs can carve Internet services into separate packages:

After paying a fee for basic service, subscribers can add any of five further options for about $6 per month, allowing an additional 10GB data allotment for the apps within the options: a “messaging” tier, which covers such services as instant messaging, Apple FaceTime, and Skype; “social,” with liberal access to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on; “video” (youTube, Netflix, etc.); “email and cloud” (Gmail, Apple’s iCloud); or “music” (Spotify, Pandora) [Michael Hiltzik, “Portugal’s Internet Shows Us a World Without Net Neutrality, and It’s Ugly,” Los Angeles Times, 2017.11.27].

Hitzlik notes that AT&T and Verizon have already tried to exploit the “zero-rating” loophole to favor its proprietary content. Let FCC Chairman Ajit Pai ditch net neutrality, and the problem will only get worse:

The FCC staff’s findings indicated that net neutrality needed tighter, not looser, regulation. Under Pai’s proposals, which will be voted on and probably approved by the majority-Republican FCC on Dec. 14, the potential for narrowing of consumer options by ISPs will only grow. You’ll be paying more for your broadband, and your choices will be left up to your ISP. Is this the internet you’ve grown accustomed to? Not in the least [Hitzlik, 2017.11.27].

The Trump FCC’s abandonment of net neutrality serves no one’s interests except the plutocrats who want to limit what we read and watch online to the content that makes them richer. ISPs could even choose our search engines and other tools for us instead of leaving shoppers, reporters, researchers, and activists free to choose their own online tools. If we can’t reason with the Trump FCC, we need to pressure Senator John Thune to mean what he says and write net neutrality into law.