Community Broadband: Privacy, Access, and Local Control

Deeplinks 2018-01-16

Summary:

Communities across the United States are considering strategies to protect residents’ access to information and their right to privacy. These experiments have a long history, but a new wave of activists have been inspired to seek a local response to federal setbacks to Internet freedom, such as the FCC’s decision to roll back net neutrality protections, and Congress’ early 2017 decision to eliminate user privacy protections.

Internet service providers (ISP) have a financial incentive and the technical ability to block or slow users' access, insert their own content on the sites we visit, or give preferential treatment to websites and services with which they have financial relationships. For many years, net neutrality principles and rules, most recently cemented in the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order, helped prevent much of this activity. Net neutrality helped create a landscape where new ideas and services could develop without being crowded out by political pressure or prioritized fast lanes for established commercial incumbents.

One need only look to two of America’s most dominant web presences to recognize how different the world might be without these protections. Both Facebook and Google began their path to dominance as dorm room experiments. How very different would our social, family, and professional lives look today if MySpace and AltaVista had been able to pay ISPs to prioritize their traffic and throttle that of competitors, hardening the market from competition and disruption?

While proponents of rolling back net neutrality regulations would have us believe that the market will force Internet providers to assure user access, the Federal Communication Commission's 2016 Broadband Progress Report notes that 51 percent of Americans have access to only one provider of high-speed Internet. As a result, incumbent service providers have little incentive to behave well.

Having fought and won the first round in the fight for net neutrality only a few short years ago, we know that there is enormous grassroots energy behind preserving the Internet as a democratic forum of ideas and innovation. We also know that lawmakers at all levels bear a fundamental responsibility to develop policies that maintain privacy protections, guarantee free speech and expression, and reduce the digital divide. Here’s how some are meeting the responsibility.

DIY Broadband

In the executive summary of its 2010 “National Broadband Plan,” the FCC noted:

Broadband is the great infrastructure challenge of the early 21st century. Like electricity a century ago, broadband is a foundation for economic growth, job creation, global competitiveness and a better way of life. It is enabling entire new industries and unlocking vast new possibilities for existing ones. It is changing how we educate children, deliver health care, manage energy, ensure public safety, engage government, and organize and disseminate knowledge.

Already many communities throughout the country have begun infrastructure-building projects aimed at answering these concerns. Local governments, like those in Ammon, ID, Nelson County, VA, and Santa Fe, NM have invested in building out community-funded broadband programs. These programs allow for the creation of high-capacity access for residents and businesses, as well as improving the accessibility of high-speed broadband service to their least-resourced community members.

While some cities have chosen to build and operate their own broadband networks, many choose instead to focus on developing just the physical infrastructure,

Link:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/community-broadband-privacy-access-and-local-control

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Authors:

Nathan Sheard

Date tagged:

01/16/2018, 21:49

Date published:

01/16/2018, 11:42