ACE and 19 other higher education associations submitted a brief yesterday to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a case that seeks to reverse the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality.
The commission rescinded the Obama-era net
neutrality rules, designed to prevent broadband service providers from
slowing or blocking internet traffic or demanding payment for faster
speed across their networks, on a 3-2 party-line vote last December. The
vote followed a contentious comment period in which ACE and other
higher education groups identified the negative impact this could have on colleges and universities.
A series of lawsuits were filed several months ago seeking to overturn the FCC’s ruling. They have been consolidated as Mozilla Corporation v. FCC and the United States of America and are now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The associations’ brief reiterates a
long-held conviction that preserving an open internet is essential for
research, education, the free flow of information, and other public
interests served by universities and libraries.
“As a stratified internet emerges,
universities and libraries will be squeezed both as content providers
and end-users,” they wrote. “Providers of internet access have
incentives to charge additional fees to certain content providers in
return for enhancing their delivery of certain traffic over other
traffic or by blocking certain websites altogether. Eliminating the
rules to prevent this behavior risks pushing universities and libraries
into the “slow lane,” unable to compete with deep-pocketed commercial
content providers, like Amazon and Netflix, for a limited amount of
bandwidth.”
The groups say that as creators of
noncommercial content, colleges and universities and libraries will be
less able to rely on the market-based approach and transparency rules
that the FCC believes will prevent blocking and throttling. As
recipients of digital content, institutions’ extensive research and
databases subscriptions will become more expensive. And the increasing
number of students who take all, or some, of their classes online will
likely pay a price as well.
Arguments have not yet been scheduled in the case.