How Obama helped reshape internet rules

Days after a crushing midterm defeat in which Democrats lost their Senate majority, President Obama released a video that endeared him to Silicon Valley and millions of internet activists.

The video, released while Obama was traveling in Asia, made the case for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to adopt the strongest possible rules to ensure a free internet.

{mosads}Obama said regulators needed to take steps to prevent broadband companies from slowing down or even blocking content. He also rejected calls for a “fast lane” that would have allowed some content providers to pay for faster speeds.

It was a crucial moment in the fight for net neutrality and a pivotal one for Obama, who showed that even after a second midterm shellacking, he wasn’t done taking action.

Twenty months later, those rules received a major validation when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld them entirely in a major decision on Tuesday. 

The decision ensures that Obama will go down in history as solidifying some of the strongest U.S. regulations written to police the conduct of internet service providers.

“Historians will do the measuring,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), an early proponent of the strong rules. “I’m saying that it is part of his legacy. This is the most transformative tool in the history of our country. And he understood what it represented and what was needed to keep it that way.” 

It won’t end the controversy surrounding those actions, however.

Republicans and telecommunications companies deeply resent the rules. They believe undue pressure from the White House was central in the decision by the FCC, under Chairman Tom Wheeler, to approve the rules.

“Chairman Wheeler claims this is a ‘victory for consumers,’ but in fact this is a victory for the liberal, Washington-knows-best, Wheeler-Obama regulatory agenda,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Tuesday.

The FCC has since struggled to explain that Obama’s push was not the main driver of its pivot.  

“Obviously at a time where Chairman Wheeler had proposed a less sweeping reform going into the 2015 open internet order, President Obama released his YouTube video, which really pivoted the debate in a fundamental way,” said Christopher Yoo, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. 

Critics have vowed to fight the rules all the way to the Supreme Court, though Tuesday’s decision makes it more likely that the regulations will be on the books for the foreseeable future. 

Approved in a divided vote in early 2015, the rules treat companies that sell monthly internet service — like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and AT&T — as common carriers, preventing them from discriminating against different types of web traffic. 

Companies that own the networks that transfer data back and forth also have an increasingly large stake in content. And as an example, the rules are meant to prevent a company like AT&T from slowing or blocking the public from accessing Hulu or Netflix in favor of its own programming. 

Early in Obama’s presidency, the FCC began drafting some of the nation’s first formal net neutrality rules. The FCC passed a less strict version of the rules back in 2010, but they were struck down three years later.   

The FCC started over again in 2014, drafting new rules that many net
neutrality activists derided as creating priority lanes for certain traffic on the internet. Many, like Eshoo, were early proponents of having the FCC go further. She noted the president “understood, as we did before him.”

The White House sees the net neutrality regulations as a fulfillment of a promise Obama made on the campaign trail back in 2007 during his first run for the White House. 

“That is why the President has so strongly supported net neutrality since he was a senator, and continues to work every day to protect the Internet ecosystem: because it remains one of the greatest gifts our economy — and our society — has ever known,” the White House said in a statement after Tuesday’s decision was handed down. 

The White House has consistently touted its work on net neutrality and other issues governing the internet. Earlier this year, the president endorsed the FCC’s plan to offer monthly subsidies to low-income Americans to help pay the cost of internet service. 

But his advocacy has been a double-edged sword. Republicans are some of the fastest to give Obama credit for the rules they despise. They accuse him of putting undue influence on an independent agency to set up a regulatory environment for the internet that was originally intended to rein in a monopoly landline telephone company. 

Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, during the net neutrality debate, took to calling the rules “Obama’s plan” in statements and speeches, and the tag has stuck. 

Yoo, an early skeptic of net neutrality, said the debate about it is important, but he questioned whether it will “loom large” in Obama’s legacy. He said experts in the field tend to put more importance on it than it deserves — framing it as a debate among companies and investors. 

“I think it would have been more harmful if he lost the case to his legacy,” Yoo said. “But the idea that this would be remembered 50 years from now as a major accomplishment in the Obama legacy, we’ll have to wait and see.”