Internet activists and a coalition of large content providers have convinced President Obama that “strong net neutrality” rules would be good for his party’s political fortunes. One aide told the Washington Post right after the November 2014 election “this is a populist issue he thinks he can win on.”
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So are these commenters representative of the public, or even the Democratic Party? New survey data suggest otherwise.
A February 2015 survey by Hart Research Associates shows that 53 percent of all adults believe that FCC’s plans to regulate Internet service providers (ISPs) “like a monopoly telephone service” would be harmful. Among self-identified Democrats, a full third believe that the President’s plan would be harmful, and only 51 percent think it would be helpful.
And with respect to enlarging the Democratic coalition, over half of self-identified Independents (55 percent) felt that public-utility regulation would be harmful. That’s a gift to Republicans. These swing voters will be turned off by what they perceive to be heavy-handed interference of high-tech industries. (Disclosure: The think tank with which I am affiliated released the survey.)
So how was the President so badly misled? According to the Wall Street Journal, Internet content providers such as Etsy, Kickstarter, and Tumblr convinced a “parallel version of the FCC” in the White House that these “small” content providers spoke for tens of millions of Internet users.
In reality, the content providers spoke for their profits. Public-utility rules that bar paid priority and regulate the price of interconnection ensure that these content providers will never make meaningful contributions in support of the Internet infrastructure. Instead, all contributions will come off the backs of Internet users. Despite the clear conflict of interest between content providers and end users when it comes to who shall pay for the Internet, big content managed to convince the White House that strong net neutrality is pro-consumer.
Further contributing to the political miscalculation, Internet activists at so-called public interest organizations like Free Press and Public Knowledge convinced the White House that strong net neutrality was broadly popular.
These activists currently have outsized influence at this highly politicized FCC. But the influence of the “Tea Party of the Left”—a term coined by TechFreedom’s Berin Szoka—in Congress seems modest by comparison. As of December 2014, a small fraction of elected Democrats came out in favor of public-utility regulation of ISPs: Only 15 percent of Democrats in Congress—equal to 39 signatories divided by 53 Senate Democrats + 201 House Democrats—supported what became the President’s plan. This bespeaks qualms about heavy-handed regulation among people with a finger on the public pulse.
Nonetheless, the President’s handlers think appeasing the Internet activists is good politics for Democrats. But they may be badly misreading the center of the political spectrum. How would a suburban soccer mom feel about public-utility regulation that threatens investment and jobs when lesser remedies would provide sufficient protection to content providers? Or how would she feel about exposing broadband consumers to billions of new telecom-related fees at the state and local level?
Despite lobbying efforts by both the White House and the FCC to keep Democrats in check, some brave progressives are coming out in favor of a legislative solution and against the President’s plan. Because net neutrality has become so politicized, Tim Lee of Vox explained that “this decision shouldn’t be left to the FCC.” In discussing the current legislative proposal, which would ban paid priority without recourse to public-utility regulation, David Post of New America wrote that “I like the Thune-Upton approach a lot more – though I do seem to be in a minority among many of my colleagues in academia and over at OTI/New America.” And even the editorial board of the Washington Post favors a legislative solution.
What Democrats should understand is that Republican enthusiasm for compromise will wane as soon as the D.C. Circuit hints that the President’s public-utility plan is in trouble. So the window for a legislative solution is closing. With luck, some Democrats who care about the party’s fate in 2016 will quickly grab the legislative pen.
