“Restoring Internet Freedom” Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [pdf]
Here is a draft of a comment I plan to submit to the FCC regarding this notice:<p>The draft seeks comment on the analysis in Paragraph 27. This analysis purports to show that broadband Internet service is an information service because it provides users the &quot;capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications.&quot; The argument given is that broadband Internet service <i>allows</i> users to do all these things. However, this is not the same as <i>providing the capability</i> to do these things. To see why, consider that providing users Internet services over dialup phone lines also allows users to do all these things; but the phone lines themselves are telecommunications services, not information services. Why? Because providing the user dialup Internet, by itself, does <i>not</i> provide them the capability to do all these things. That capability is provided by the endpoints: the users&#x27; computers, and the computers hosting the Internet services that the users connect to.<p>Exactly the same is true of broadband Internet services provided by ISPs: by themselves, they do <i>not</i> provide users the capability to do all these things. They only provide connections between computers at the endpoints that provide those capabilities. It is the services provided by the Internet hosts that users connect to that are &quot;information services&quot;. The broadband Internet services that allow users to connect to those hosts are telecommunications services, and should be regulated as such.<p>ISPs object to analyses like the one above because they claim that they also provide the actual information services--in other words, they also provide Internet hosts that function as email servers, web servers, etc. But it is obvious that those services are <i>separate</i> from the broadband connection services provided by those same ISPs, because users can make use of the latter without making use of the former at all. I am such a user: I use the broadband Internet connection provided by my ISP, but I do not use any of the information services they provide; I do not use their email, their web hosting, etc. I use other Internet hosts provided by other companies for those services. The fact that ISPs offer information services as well as telecommunications services does not make their telecommunications services into information services; an ISP&#x27;s choice of business model cannot change the nature of a particular service it provides. Broadband Internet connections are obviously a telecommunications service, and should be regulated as such, regardless of what other services ISPs would like to bundle with them. The FCC should continue to regulate broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.