The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Erica Portnoy and Jeremy Gillula
analyze a FCC’s recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that served as
precursor to the order to kill net neutrality and explain how
fantastically, totally wrong it gets the internet – not on a mere
philosophical level, but on a nuts-and-bolts, bits-and-bytes technical level. Literally, the FCC doesn’t know what the internet is.
The FCC insists that there’s a thing called “the internet” that your ISP
helps you receive “transmissions” from. But the internet – the network
of networks – is your ISP, and its connections to all the
other ISPs. The internet isn’t “some vaguely defined other realm that an
ISP opens a portal to.”
But that’s just for starters: the FCC also doesn’t understand how DNS works, how caching works, or how the phone system works, either.
