After much discussing amongst ourselves, I got the date/time hammered down, reserved the conference room for us in the Berkman Center, and e-mailed Prof. Zittrain with the information. Another intern suggested reading material ("Keeping the Internet Neutral: Tim Wu and Christopher Yoo debate," published in the Federal Communications Journal) for us which we then circulated. Then this Wednesday afternoon at 5, it was time.
I will admit I was nervous -- I've never organized something like this and I was afraid that if people didn't speak up readily that I might end up looking silly for suggesting the whole thing, especially if Prof. Zittrain showed up (which he did).
Not to worry. There were plenty of pretty strong, well-informed opinions, and all seemed in favor of a mandate for net neutrality. We covered everything from free speech to economic impact to equal access, and after about an hour of going back and forth amongst ourselves with JZ listening, he finally weighed in and decided to play Devil's Advocate in response to several issues we had raised:
Point 1: Those who favor net neutrality tend to think what everyone wants is a "right" to free, fast flow of information from point A to point B. However, what Internet Service Providers think we want is basically the ability to watch TV online — think Netflix/YouTube, but those services and *only* those services. If that's true, then it makes sense to limit what we get through the Internet to "packages" that fit different budgets. But what we (meaning those supporting net neutrality) envision for the Internet is a world with equal access at equal price to all content by all people. So package deals that discriminate against certain content rubs us the wrong way, but they do make sense to providers.
Point 2: There's a lot of paranoia amongst those of who don't want corporations deciding what content they can filter. But really, we have to decide which is better -- allowing the government to control this (and they would through FCC regulating the Internet) or corporations controlling it? Is one really better? He gave the great ironic example of U.S. v. Grace, where a woman was distributing pamphlets, which had the First Amendment inscribed within them, outside the United States Supreme Court, and was arrested for trespass. Her case ironically went all the way up to the Supreme Court. While a funny example, it illustrates this dilemma: Does it make sense to have regulations subject to scrutiny based on what is a public forum (meaning the government can't restrict content but could restrict the time/place/manner of the speech) or isn't a public forum applying to the Internet?
Point 3: How come the discussion about neutrality doesn't come up when we have limited numbers of channels available on a cable service? Somehow it's only with the Internet that we believe we have a right to unlimited access to all information, even though there are still some concerns for scarcity with the Internet based on bandwidth. Even dedicated bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean the service has unlimited bandwidth. Think about Netflix, for example. Streaming Netflix takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, and if every other user on one network streams Netflix, then they are taking up a huge amount of bandwidth yet paying no more or less than any other consumer.
In the end, regardless of what position we take, we had a healthy discussion about something highly relevant, interesting and complex, and got to interact with THE Jonathan Zittrain, the Chuck Norris of the Internet.
I'm calling this one a win.
Image created by believekevin and received from Creative Commons, some rights reserved. No endorsement intended.
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