Team Internet is About to Win Net Neutrality. And They Didn’t Need Google’s Help.

[Reefa]

Or Facebook’s, or Microsoft’s, or Twitter’s…

Two years ago Internet freedom organizers won a major victory against the copyright industry in killing SOPA. The collapse of the bill, which was on fast-track to pass through Congress with overwhelming corporate support, was unlike anything we’ve seen in recent political history. But the organizers did have some powerful companies on their side, and once the dust settled there was still an open question about who was more important in the win — the companies or the public.

In the looming net neutrality victory, the Internet has shown that it can win even when the biggest stakeholders stay on the sidelines. What’s more, they didn’t win net neutrality simply by killing an impending threat; they actually convinced the government to pro-actively design a major new policy in their favor. The government has a well-known status quo bias with strong systemic factors making change much more difficult to achieve than just keeping things the way they are, so this is a key part of what makes this win so significant. There is very little precedent for public interest groups winning policy changes in their favor that have significant corporate opposition when they have close to no corporate support on their own side.

This net neutrality victory is more evidence of what many suspected after SOPA — what makes the Internet a powerful space for collaboration and innovation also gives it a powerful self-defense mechanism, and attempts to break it will be met with decentralized, grassroots political action that organized money can’t simply plow down.

A year ago, when the Federal Communications Commission announced it would create new rules for net neutrality, the option for reclassification under Title II of the Communication Act was just a footnote in the discussion. As laid out by the FCC, the plan was to create new rules that, although not sufficient to actually prevent fast lanes, could survive an inevitable court challenge from Verizon or some other telcom. Congressional Democrats urged FCC Chair Tom Wheeler to at least hold Title II reclassification open as a stick approach, which he did, but virtually no one at the time expected the FCC to go with anything other than another carrot.

I don’t think there is a single person that believed last February that Title II was politically possible. Plenty of people believed it was the only way to actually ensure net neutrality. The courts had made that clear. But deregulation has been the golden goose of the telecom industry for decades and no one expects a scrappy win over one of the most powerful lobbies in the world.

The opposition

Companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, and trade groups representing the industry, have for years used every avenue available to them to kill net neutrality and have fought not to be called Title II common carriers. Big telecom is widely regarded as one of the most politically powerful industries. They have been joined in this fight by shadowy nonprofits like TechFreedom, a group that does not disclose its donor but acknowledges having taken money from broadband companies, and American Commitment, a group with ties to the Koch network (they won’t say whether or not they take money from the Kochs).

The support

The public fight for reclassification has been waged by grassroots activist groups like Popular Resistance, Free Press, Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, Center for Media Justice, Color of Change, and many others (full list of organization, companies, and individuals here). In addition, the start-up community was largely on their side, with trade groups like Engine calling for Title II and helping to organize. Companies including Netflix, Etsy, Tumblr, and Kickstarter, among other, were supportive of reclassification and took some action to engage their users. Later in the debate, wireless underdog Sprint joined the call for reclassification, although they didn’t participate in any efforts to organize the public to take action. This was a fight led start-to-finish by grassroots groups outside of D.C. with support from smaller players in the tech industry and allies inside the Beltway.

Missing in Action

All of the largest stakeholders that were key active participants in fighting SOPA were largely silent on the Title II reclassification fight. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt actually lobbied against reclassification in meetings with the White House. The Internet Association, a trade group with membership including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and hundreds of other companies, did send a lukewarm letter approving of reclassification. However Microsoft, Facebook, and Google are all also part of other trade groups that are opposed to Title II reclassification, like ITIC. What’s absolutely clear is they have done nothing to engage the public at large, a stark contrast to their involvement in SOPA. The reason, presumably, is that net neutrality helps their smaller competitors more than it helps them. The giants of the Internet would have no problem complying with whatever tolls are charged by ISPs for faster speeds, but the search engines and social networks of tomorrow likely would. Other groups that typically fight with Internet freedom activists and were with them on the SOPA fight stayed mostly silent on the issue, possibly because they receive funding from the telecoms. This includes at least the Center for Technology and Democracy.

The money

Without any of the top web companies with them, net neutrality advocates were utterly dwarfed by their opposition in financial resources. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, the key groups fighting Title II rules — Comcast, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, AT&T, and Verizon — spent $61 million on lobbying the government in 2014 and an additional $14.5 million on campaign contributions during the 2014 cycle. The lobbying and political contributions of the key groups organizing the fight for Title II reclassification totals under $100,000.

This latest round for net neutrality began officially on February 19, 2014 when the FCC announced their intention to create new rules. But the groundwork for the activism that would be the game changer had been laid many years earlier.

In 2006, Free Press and dozens of other groups formed the Save the Internet Coalition to fight early attempts by telecom companies to exploit deregulation and extract tolls on the Internet. That work put net neutrality on the map as an important issue for the progressive political activism community and, perhaps more importantly, for the public-interest funding community. It also meant that a lot of the policy work that would be needed was already in-hand and relationships with brilliant lawyers had been established (folks like like Barbara van Schewick and Marvin Ammori), and they were there to walk the FCC through the importance of a Title II approach. Organizations like the Ford Foundation and the Media Democracy Fund were prepared to provide financial support for the fight.

But what vaulted activists over the top was not lobbying in D.C., but the record levels of public engagement they inspired across the country. Since the FCC opened their public comment period, nearly 4 million people have submitted comments regarding the net neutrality docket, more than the commission has ever received for an issue. Tom Wheeler acknowledged the power and importance of these comments by mentioning them in the opening sentence of his public announcement of Title II rules published at Wired.

The vast majority of the comments to the FCC favored strong Title II rules. Besides these comments, millions of individuals made calls to the commission or contacted their members of Congress. What makes this even more impressive is that net neutrality is a technical and complex issue with a bland name that is barely discussed in the mainstream press (in part because of the affiliations between media companies and telecoms). And it’s being fought around a rulemaking process at a regulatory agency. Again, there’s not a lot of precedent for this.

The organizers obviously used successful tactics to promote this engagement (some of which is discussed below), but this was about more than good tools and smart messaging. None of this would have been possible if there were not already millions of people inclined to invest some of their time in this effort.

Here are a few of the factors that I think made this possible.

1. Anti-monopoly sentiment —  From big banks to big telecom companies like Comcast, Americans from across the political spectrum are growing skeptical of monopolistic businesses. The younger demographics are the most skeptical, suggesting that anti-monopoly attitudes are on the rise. Net neutrality is an anti-monopoly fight because toll roads on the Internet only works as a profit model if consumers and content providers literally have no other choice but to pay up.

2. Frustration with ISPs  — The problem with monopoly power is more apparent in the telecom industry than just about anywhere else. Because of the telecoms’ dominant market positions and power to design policies in their favor, America has fallen behind the rest of the developed world in broadband access. People are frustrated with their ISPs, and they’re mad that they have no real choices in the matter. Thanks in part to their horrid customer service, Comcast is consistently ranked as the most hated company in America.

3. No one wants crappy Internet —  Fast lanes and slow lanes on the Internet could lead to censorship and make it harder to share content on your favorite websites. Slower speeds for companies that can’t afford to pay up would mean that startup social networks that could improve on the dominant players of today may never come into existence. Sites like Reddit and Tumblr may have never been built without net neutrality protections. In the wake of the NSA revelations, people want alternatives to the big online companies like Facebook and Google. No one wants crappy Internet, and polling shows that support for net neutrality is thoroughly bipartisan. Net neutrality organizers gave millions of American something they could actually do with their anger over monopolies, censorship, and surveillance.

Popular Resistance activists blocked in Tom Wheeler’s Mini Cooper.

The net neutrality fight never went viral to the extent that the SOPA fight did. This at least in part because the biggest players, like Google, were silent, but it’s also because pushing for new policy is a lot harder to rally around than pushing to kill something (vaguer enemies). Clearly, the record levels of public engagement at the FCC show that people were inclined to take action if shown the way. But this effort was spurred by organizers and organizations every step of the way.

Below are just a few of the strategies and tactics that were used. I can’t post a comprehensive list, but please add more in comments.

1. Battle for the Net —  Fight for the Future built this site with help from Demand Progress and Free Press that became the homepage for the campaign. It includes a rotating action center for directing calls/emails to the target du jour, a political scoreboard for tracking where politicians stand, and social media tools. The site was so successful that its code was copied by anti-net neutrality groups.

2. Ground game —This was really led by Popular Resistance, but other folks joined in. Activists occupied the FCC’s tiny strip of lawn for weeks and physically blocked Tom Wheeler’s driveway one morning because, they said, he wasn’t going to work for the public. Emergency protests were held in cities across the country and www.protestsign.org was built to instantly turn any screen into a protest sign.

3. Daily FCC calls—Fight for the Future built a call tool that let people sign up to make daily calls to random people at the FCC. The strategy was that if low-level FCC employees were being bombarded with net neutrality calls they would have a responsibility to bring it up in meetings. At its peak there were more than 2,000 were making daily calls to random FCC answering machines.

4. Hitting all levers of power—The FCC Commissioners, and Chairman Wheeler in particular, are the ones who would make the decision, but activists also targeted anybody who could influence them, including the White House, Congress, and companies. President Obama’s support for Title II shows how important this was.

5. No pre-compromise—Organizations like Mozilla and some inside-the-Beltway interest groups were reluctant to push a Title II approach to net neutrality. Grassroots activists proceeded with fighting for what they believed would actually be effective and eventually convinced other groups to join them.

6. Internet slowdown— This was perhaps the most SOPA-like moment. On September 10, 2014, grassroots groups got over 40,000 websites to post slow-loading icons on their homepages that showed what the Internet could look like without net neutrality protections. Top participating sites included Tumblr, Netflix, and Vimeo.

7. Organizing communities of color— The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been lobbying against net neutrality after receiving major funding from Comcast. In response, Color of Change and other organizations got their members to lobby the Congressional Black Caucus in support of net neutrality. They managed to flip several caucus members to lobby the FCC in support of Title II.

The net neutrality debate is far from settled. The FCC still needs to vote on Wheeler’s proposal on Feb. 26, and that leaves plenty of time for telecom lobbyists to work their magic. Indeed, Republicans in Congress who are backed by contributions from the big ISPs are already working on a plan to block the FCC with legislation. Even if the FCC approves Wheeler’s reclassification proposal, the telecom companies already have plans to challenge it in court.

So, it’s not over yet, but I think the important take away already is that winning policy isn’t just about money, it’s about power more broadly, and the Internet seems to be giving the public a key source of political power when combined with smart organizing. Hardly anything is more worth protecting than that power. So hats off to everyone who’s done anything to support net neutrality. Remain vigilant.

Full disclosure: I am a card-carrying, t-shirt-wearing member of Team Internet and I formerly served on the Board of Directors for Fight for the Future.

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