WCA MAY 2015

From the Americas

Then, last June, the host of HBO’s ‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’ took an interest. In a segment that has been viewed over eight million times on YouTube , the Birmingham-born comedian, now based in New York, accomplished something extraordinary. Making abstruse subject matter entirely intelligible and ably arguing his own pro-neutrality position, he also contrived to actively engage the general public in a topic that he pronounced, “boring even by C-SPAN standards.” The reference is to the Washington-based cable and satellite TV network that covers proceedings of the federal government in real time. But Mr Oliver’s approach was anything but static. He drew first blood from Mr Wheeler: “Yes, the guy who used to run the cable industry’s lobbying arm is now running the agency tasked with regulating it. That is the equivalent of needing a babysitter and hiring a dingo. ‘Make sure they’re in bed by eight, there’s 20 bucks on the table for kibbles, so please don’t eat my baby.’” ‘I am not a dingo’ The Cambridge-educated Mr Oliver urged his viewers to contact the FCC. They did, by the tens of thousands over the next few days, flooding the agency with comments and crashing its website. Millions followed suit, the vast majority demanding net neutrality. What Time magazine termed “the Oliver effect” was not lost on Mr Wheeler, who told reporters: “I would like to state for the record that I am not a dingo.” Writing just before the FCC decision was announced, the New York editor of the Christian Science Monitor , Harry Bruinius, recalled that the agency was poised to pass – with Mr Wheeler’s yea vote – “what seemed unthinkable” less than a year before.  It is incontrovertible that Mr Oliver’s performance contributed importantly to stopping the ‘fast lanes’ long sought by the companies in command of USA Internet infrastructure. Aram Sinnreich, a professor of communication and information at Rutgers University (New Jersey), told Mr Bruinius: “John Oliver absolutely helped turn the tide in the net-neutrality debate.” (“Net Neutrality’s Stunning Reversal of Fortune: Is It John Oliver’s Doing?,” 26 th February)  What that tide brought in was the reclassification of high-speed broadband service as a basic public utility: a common service akin to phone lines, water pipes or the energy grid, and therefore a kind of protected and regulated public good. It was a stunning victory for the advocates of net neutrality – and an incidental acknowledgment of the influence that can be wielded by a brilliant funnyman with a cause.

Yet, as soon as Mr Wheeler announced plans for strong net-neutrality rules, on 4 th February, broadband stocks jumped, and they have stayed buoyant. One baffled telecom analyst told the New Yorker : “I think it just shows you that the market doesn’t really understand these issues.”  Mr Wu suspects otherwise. He wrote: “The theory of the wisdom of crowds suggests that the markets have noticed something. The broadband industry hates net neutrality, but its existence has always had a huge and unnoticed upside: selling broadband is a great business.” In fact, according to the analyst at a loss for an explanation, the margins are north of 97 per cent. Stated simply, a strong net-neutrality rule locks in the status quo for the most profitable segment of cable industry business.  As for the future, the Columbia law professor is dubious about the assumption that the new rules will be met with fierce and protracted litigation- “perhaps decades of it, warn the greatest doomsayers.” It is true that most serious regulation is immediately challenged in court. And Verizon and AT&T have both already threatened to sue. But Mr Wu noted that, given the jump in stock prices, filing a lawsuit will technically be suing to invalidate rules that seem to have created billions of dollars of shareholder value for the broadband providers. Again, suing the FCC tends to annoy the agency, before which both AT&T and Comcast have mergers pending. Sprint has already said that it doesn’t mind net-neutrality regulation. And, wrote Mr Wu: “It is hard to imagine a smaller company really wanting to bother.”

Getting real, a British fake-news comedian prods Americans into taking a side – his – in the net neutrality debate

A scant year before the Federal Communications Commission acted on net neutrality few outside the telecom community had ever heard of it, despite extensive news coverage. Tom Wheeler, appointed to lead the FCC by President Obama in 2013, was mulling over new rules to allow broadband companies to provide “fast lanes” that would enable content providers to offer streamlined Internet connections to customers willing to pay. Mr Wheeler, a former top lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries, seemed favourably disposed to the idea. But the policy debate, which exercised the agency and the telecom industry, left the American public unmoved to the point of indifference.

Dorothy Fabian Features Editor

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Wire & Cable ASIA – May/June 2015