"How the Little Guys Beat the Monopolists on Net Neutrality/A Political Miracle"--Zephyr Teachout

How the Little Guys Beat the Monopolists on Net Neutrality
Written byZephyr Teachout
02.09.15

And it’s a political miracle.

A year ago, this [Net Neutrality] was called “the nuclear option.” It was seen as so toxic to big cable, and so radical, that it was used by the pragmatists in Washington simply as a tool to push for something greater.

Nine months ago, one of us wrote an oped asking Barack Obama to demote Tom Wheeler as FCC chair, because he had proposed rules diametrically opposed to the ones he is now actively pushing. His proposal would have allowed for a two-tiered Internet--one for those with power, one for those without. Firing Wheeler seemed essential because he had spent his life as a big cable lobbyist. He epitomized the revolving door coming to government from the Wireless Association, which lobbies for AT&T and Verizon, among others, and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, one of the largest lobbying forces in the country.

And big cable came ready to fight. The groups that opposed the so-called Title II reclassification spent more than $75 million lobbying last year alone, and their names are well known: Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and their trade groups. The big web companies that grew up thanks to openness on the Internet behaved more like jealous gatekeepers. Top companies like Facebook and Google were either conspicuously silent or actively lobbied against real net neutrality rules, preferring to force would-be competitors to struggle with tolls.

What happened? Wheeler was forced to reverse his course because of an explosion of the type of decentralized political power that even the most powerful Washington lobbies cannot beat. American citizens flooded the FCC with comments on their proposal. They overwhelmingly demanded real net neutrality rules. People sick of monopolistic telecommunications companies dictating their Internet spoke out, with passion and in unheard-of numbers. No issue before the FCC had ever topped 1.4 million comments. Net neutrality supporters submitted 4 million. That’s nearly 5 percent of the people who voted in the midterm elections submitting comments for an issue that is considered arcane and was barely an idea a decade ago.

The organizers who led the fight employed a basic but rarely used strategy: fighting for what they believed was important without pre-compromising to comply with what Washington thought was politically possible. They asked for bright-line rules that would actually protect the open Internet, something that the courts have made clear could be accomplished only with regulatory reclassification of broadband. They showed how conviction and honest communication with the public can create watershed moments.

It seemed impossible a year ago because if you made a power map, you’d have seen a modest, courageous coalition of small web companies, political activists, and public interest groups on the one hand, and the biggest monopolists on the other. The biggest organizational players in support of Title II classification were groups that did not exist 15 years ago.


Continued and Good Read of what targeted "People Power" can accomplish at:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/09/how-the-little-guys-beat-the-monopolists-on-net-neutrality.html