A Brief History of the Network Neutrality Movement
The social movement to protect network neutrality is a relatively young and on-going grassroots movement, which began in 2005 after an FCC decision that eliminated rules which kept internet service providers from discriminating against content providers. Network neutrality essentially means the non-discriminatory or neutral treatment of all internet content; it allows users to pick and choose what content they want to access and guarantees that no matter what content they choose, whether it be a large corporate website or small niche blog, they will be able to download it at the same speed and without the intermediary role of a gatekeeper. Much of the internet’s phenomenal growth, progress, and social contributions are largely attributed to the open and egalitarian principles by which it has historically operated, of which network neutrality is a prime example.
The movement to protect and preserve net neutrality must be seen in context to the broader social movement for media reform, which has gained strength in recent years due in large part to a non-profit, non-partisan media policy group called Free Press. Free Press was started up in 2002 by Josh Silver, journalist John Nichols, and well-known media scholar Robert W. McChesney, and has since become the leading U.S. organization in the media reform movement, made up of volunteers, staff, and a vast grassroots activist network from all ends of the political spectrum. The organization is policy focused and tackles many issues under the umbrella of media reform, including media concentration and ownership, internet policy, public media, and the quality of journalism. Much of their internet policy work falls under their umbrella initiative called the Save The Internet.com Coalition, which has focused its efforts on preserving and protecting internet freedom, and is responsible for spearheading the net neutrality movement. The preservation of net neutrality is considered a cornerstone issue in the media reform movement, which owes much of its present success to the internet and its open, democratic structure.
Free Press is guided by the historical and political economic scholarship of McChesney, whose extensive research on the history of U.S. media policy and its direct relationship to the foundation and functioning of democracy serves to inform the organization’s core principles. First and foremost, the organization acknowledges that a healthy and functioning democracy is dependent upon a healthy public sphere, which in contemporary society is comprised primarily of the media. They recognize that the current media system is in crisis and that this directly affects citizens’ abilities to self-govern and participate democratically. Perhaps most importantly, they understand that the current media system is not the result of market forces, but rather is directly shaped by government policies, which are theoretically meant to serve the public interest but in practice are largely influenced by corporate liberal ideology.
Free Press’s efforts can then be classified as forms of both vertical and lateral deviance; though they dispute the corporate liberal ideology through which media (and arguably all) policy is formed through their research and educational efforts, they also work within the system to affect policy directly through their Free Press Action Fund advocacy work. Their activist organization and campaign efforts cater to both arms of this two-pronged strategy. One of their most successful efforts to date has been the Save The Internet.com Coalition, and its campaign to make network neutrality a public policy initiative. The Coalition is notable not only in its role as a successful grassroots campaign within the media reform movement, but because it is representative of an early successful political campaign waged almost entirely through the internet.
The network neutrality movement gained momentum in 2006, in response to a piece of legislation being introduced to the U.S. Congress called the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006 (H.R. 5252), commonly known as the COPE Act. Among other things, the bill allowed network owners - the cable and phone companies - to implement tiered online services which would divide the internet into slow and fast lanes, effectively imposing a class system on to content delivery and access. The bill provided no legal protection for net neutrality or consequences for violations of the FCC’s net neutrality policy statement (outlining voluntary network ethics guidelines), essentially giving the internet service providers free reign to decide which content providers would get access to faster services. Presumably this decision would be based on a payment model, but as we have seen with Comcast’s infamous blocking of peer-to-peer application traffic, this is not necessarily the case. This bill signaled the first structural corporate takeover of the medium, and thus posed the first big threat to internet democracy, leading Free Press to launch the network neutrality movement through its now well-known campaign, SavetheInternet.com.
The movement was launched through a well-designed, easily navigable main website (SavetheInternet.com), which provided in-depth information about the issue of net neutrality, including multimedia elements and a brief and accessible broadsheet entitled “Net Neutrality 101.” The main site was accompanied by a watchdog blog which kept up-to-date information about congressional action, press coverage of the issue, the corporate response to the movement, and progress of the movement as a whole. The research, reporting, and presentation of information that formulated these resources constituted the basis of the campaign’s petition strategy, which was conducted primarily in-house by staff and affiliates. These resources provided a critical and central starting point for citizens to become involved in the movement, where at the time there was little to no information available about the issue or its legislation.
Free Press began building its Coalition by forming alliances with public interest groups and high profile individuals from across the political spectrum. From the beginning, Free Press saw their objectives as inherently non-partisan, where access and control to the media served the interests of all members of the public, and this non-partisan foundation served their promulgation and solidification strategies particularly well, allowing them to organize over a million active petitioners within a relatively short time span (less than a year). Groups from Moveon.org to the Christian Coalition of America saw net neutrality as integral to their free speech abilities; by joining the Coalition they brought a vast number of individuals with extremely different backgrounds and interests to galvanize around a common goal. From a political standpoint, this strengthened the movement by making the issue a uniquely neutral one for politicians interested in appeasing diverse constituencies. Even private organizations had an interest in the movement, joining with their own campaign called It’s Our Net (itsournet.org, now called the Open Internet Coalition), with such large companies in tow as Google, Yahoo and eBay. Though their interests were admittedly commercial (Google for instance would pay an extremely high price if tiered services came into effect), it’s also true that these internet-based companies owe much of their success to an open, democratic Internet.
In addition to organizing a coalition of diverse organizations, Free Press tapped into its grassroots activist network, notifying members of its new “internet freedom” initiative through email campaigns and the main Free Press website. The Save The Internet campaign also had the reciprocal effect of attracting new members to Free Press and the larger media reform movement through the specific issue of net neutrality. The Coalition wasn’t complete of course without representatives in Congress who would advocate their cause, and the net neutrality movement found vocal advocates in Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), and Representatives John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who authored the first proposed net neutrality amendment to the COPE Act (which was later reclassified as the Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunities Reform Act).
One of the largest obstacles in the net neutrality movement was simply informing the public about the issue, which was named the number one uncovered news story in 2006 by Sonoma State University’s Project Censored. Free Press therefore focused a large part of its efforts on educating the public about the under-publicized legislation, and the issue of network neutrality itself. In addition to the educational and promotional resources provided through their websites, the Coalition engaged members of the independent press, in particular those in the political blogosphere. The Coalition dispatched a substantive pre-launch publicity initiative, and soon after notifying independent internet media outlets of the campaign’s launch, there were over 135 postings that mentioned or linked to the campaign. A week after the campaign’s launch, over 2,500 blogs were mentioning or linking to the campaign’s website.
This wildfire internet coverage had a trickle up effect, eliciting substantial attention to the issue and movement in the mainstream media, including large media outlets such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. Coupled with the distributed educational and promotional efforts of Coalition members such as Alex Curtis of the public interest group Public Knowledge who created a video explanation of net neutrality that was viewed over 8,000 times within days of the campaign’s launch, the success of the campaign’s promulgation efforts was cemented. The Coalition worked swiftly to get this large outpouring of public support in writing, activating its activist email network through a petition drive to support the Markey authored, COPE Act net neutrality amendment. The petition drive included pre-made electronic letters to Congress as part of its mobilization strategy, which members could fill out, personalize, and send automatically to their Congressman based on a provided zip code; the email campaign also embedded easy-to-use, informational tools for finding and contacting local Congress members directly, and provided regular update notifications of the initiative’s progress in Congress.
In less than a week after the Save The Internet.com’s campaign launch, there were over 250,000 petition signatures in support of the Markey amendment. Though the amendment was defeated by a vote of 34-22 in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the unexpected narrow margin was attributed to the sudden attention and large public outcry that had assimilated in a matter of weeks. The demonstrated public disapproval of a two-tiered internet system and support of legal network neutrality protections paved the way for further legislative action to be taken; it also put any future actions concerning corporate control of the network under (a prior non-existent) public scrutiny.
The Coalition managed to frame a somewhat complicated and technical issue like net neutrality as a simple, democratic (“internet freedom”) and free speech (“the first amendment of the internet”) issue. This marketing savvy coupled with an acute understanding of how to leverage the internet in its campaign efforts contributed to the campaign’s instrumental success in putting the issue on the political map. Though the need for solid legislation to protect network neutrality and other open access initiatives in internet policy remains an on-going battle, the ability to set the terms of discourse and debate about the issue, is what marks the campaign’s biggest victory; as Bill Moyer’s said at the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform (also organized by Free Press), “It is no longer about whether equality of access will govern the future of the Internet, it’s about when and how.” As a result, the “the establishment” has been unable to hide or dismiss the issue, and its response has been limited to counter persuasion techniques, which has materialized most notably in their misleading, propaganda campaign called Hands Off The Internet. Despite the propaganda campaign’s marginal success in obfuscating the issue, the network neutrality movement has continued to grow and make headway in the decisions of regulatory bodies.
The Save The Internet.com Coalition continues to fight for solid legislation which will protect network neutrality, and has expanded its efforts by utilizing social media platforms such as Facebook, providing badges on its main website for users to embed, and producing its own viral videos in order to spread the message to wider audiences. The future prospects for internet freedom are bright, with the incoming Obama administration’s declared dedication to preserving net neutrality.