Originally used to mean 'using a wide-spread frequency' and for
services that were analog at the lowest level, nowadays in the context
of Internet access, 'broadband' is often used to mean any high-speed Internet access that is seemingly always 'on' and is faster than dial-up access over traditional analog or ISDNPSTN services.
The ideal telecommunication network has the following characteristics: broadband, multi-media, multi-point, multi-rate and economical implementation for a diversity of services (multi-services). The Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN) was planned to provide these characteristics. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was promoted as a target technology for meeting these requirements.
Overview
Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times. Its origin is in physics, acoustics, and radio systems engineering, where it had been used with a meaning similar to "wideband", or in the context of audio noise reduction systems, where it indicated a single-band rather than a multiple-audio-band system design of the compander. Later, with the advent of digital telecommunications, the term was mainly used for transmission over multiple channels. Whereas a passband signal is also modulated so that it occupies higher frequencies (compared to a baseband signal which is bound to the lowest end of the spectrum, see line coding), it is still occupying a single channel. The key difference is that what is typically considered a broadband signal in this sense is a signal that occupies multiple (non-masking, orthogonal)
passbands, thus allowing for much higher throughput over a single
medium but with additional complexity in the transmitter/receiver
circuitry.
The term became popularized through the 1990s as a marketing term for Internet access that was faster than dial-up access
(dial-up being typically limited to a maximum of 56 kbit/s). This
meaning is only distantly related to its original technical meaning.
Since 1999, broadband Internet access has been a factor in public policy. In that year, at the World Trade Organization Biannual Conference called “Financial Solutions to Digital Divide”
in Seattle, the term “Meaningful Broadband” was introduced to the world
leaders, leading to the activation of a movement to close the digital divide. Fundamental aspects of this movement are to suggest that the equitable distribution of broadband is a fundamental human right.
Personal computing facilitated easy access, manipulation,
storage, and exchange of information, and required reliable data
transmission. Communicating documents by images and the use of
high-resolution graphics terminals provided a more natural and
informative mode of human interaction than do voice and data alone. Video teleconferencing
enhances group interaction at a distance. High-definition entertainment
video improves the quality of pictures, but requires much higher
transmission rates.
These new data transmission requirements may require new transmission means other than the present overcrowded radio spectrum. A modern telecommunications network (such as the broadband network) must provide all these different services (multi-services) to the user.
These aspects are examined individually in the following three sub-sections.
Multimedia
A multimedia call may communicate audio, data, still images, or full-motion video, or any combination of these media. Each medium has different demands for communication quality, such as:
The information content of each medium may affect the information
generated by other media. For example, voice could be transcribed into
data via voice recognition, and data commands may control the way voice
and video are presented. These interactions most often occur at the
communication terminals, but may also occur within the network.
Multipoint
Traditional
voice calls are predominantly two party calls, requiring a
point-to-point connection using only the voice medium. To access
pictorial information in a remote database would require a
point-to-point connection that sends low bit-rate queries to the
database and high bit-rate video from the database. Entertainment video
applications are largely point-to-multi-point connections, requiring one
way communication of full motion video and audio from the program
source to the viewers. Video teleconferencing involves connections among
many parties, communicating voice, video, as well as data. Offering
future services thus requires flexible management of the connection and
media requests of a multipoint, multimedia communication call.
Multirate
A
multirate service network is one which flexibly allocates transmission
capacity to connections. A multimedia network has to support a broad
range of bit-rates demanded by connections, not only because there are
many communication media, but also because a communication medium may be
encoded by algorithms with different bit-rates. For example, audio
signals can be encoded with bit-rates ranging from less than 1 kbit/s to
hundreds of kbit/s, using different encoding algorithms with a wide
range of complexity and quality of audio reproduction. Similarly, full
motion video signals may be encoded with bit-rates ranging from less
than 1 Mbit/s to hundreds of Mbit/s. Thus a network transporting both
video and audio signals may have to integrate traffic with a very broad
range of bit-rates.
A single network for multiple services
Traditionally,
different telecommunications services were carried via separate
networks: voice on the telephone network, data on computer networks such as local area networks, video teleconferencing on private corporate networks, and television on broadcast radio or cable networks.
These networks were largely engineered for a specific application
and are not suited to other applications. For example, the traditional
telephone network is too noisy and inefficient for bursty data
communication. On the other hand, data networks which store and forward
messages using computers had limited connectivity, usually did not have
sufficient bandwidth for digitised voice and video signals, and suffer
from unacceptable delays for the real-time signals. Television networks
using radio or cables were largely broadcast networks with minimum
switching facilities.
It was desirable to have a single network for providing all these
communication services to achieve the economy of sharing. This economy
motivates the general idea of an integrated services network.
Integration avoids the need for many overlaying networks, which
complicates network management and reduces flexibility in the
introduction and evolution of services. This integration was made
possible with advances in broadband technologies and high-speed
information processing of the 1990s.
While multiple network structures were capable of supporting
broadband services, an ever-increasing percentage of broadband and MSO
providers opted for fibre-optic network structures to support both
present and future bandwidth requirements.
CATV (cable television), HDTV (high definition television), VoIP (voice over internet protocol), and broadband internet
are some of the most common applications now being supported by fibre
optic networks, in some cases directly to the home (FTTh – Fibre To The
Home). These types of fibre optic networks incorporate a wide variety of
products to support and distribute the signal from the central office
to an optic node, and ultimately to the subscriber (end-user).
Broadband technologies
Telecommunications
In telecommunications,
a broadband signalling method is one that handles a wide band of
frequencies. "Broadband" is a relative term, understood according to its
context. The wider (or broader) the bandwidth of a channel, the greater the data-carrying capacity, given the same channel quality.
In radio, for example, a very narrow band will carry Morse code, a broader band will carry speech, and a still broader band will carry music without losing the high audio frequencies required for realistic sound reproduction. This broad band is often divided into channels or "frequency bins" using passband techniques to allow frequency-division multiplexing instead of sending a higher-quality signal.
In data communications, a 56k modem will transmit a data rate of 56 kilobits per second (kbit/s) over a 4-kilohertz-wide telephone line (narrowband or voiceband). In the late 1980s, the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN) used the term to refer to a broad range of bit rates, independent of physical modulation details. The various forms of digital subscriber line (DSL) services are broadband in the sense that digital information is sent over multiple channels. Each channel is at a higher frequency than the baseband voice channel, so it can support plain old telephone service on a single pair of wires at the same time. However, when that same line is converted to a non-loaded
twisted-pair wire (no telephone filters), it becomes hundreds of
kilohertz wide (broadband) and can carry up to 100 megabits per second
using very high-bit rate digital subscriber line (VDSL or VHDSL) techniques.
Modern networks have to carry integrated traffic consisting of voice, video and data. The Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN) was designed for these needs. The types of traffic supported by a broadband network can be classified according to three characteristics:
Bandwidth is the amount of network capacity required to support a connection.
Latency is the amount of delay associated with a connection. Requesting low latency in the quality of service (QoS) profile means that the cells need to travel quickly from one point in the network to another.
Cell-delay variation (CDV) is the range of delays experienced by
each group of associated cells. Low cell-delay variation means a group
of cells must travel through the network without getting too far apart
from one another.
Cellular networks utilize various standards for data transmission, including 5G which can support one million separate devices per square kilometer.
Requirements of the types of traffic
The types of traffic found in a broadband network (with examples) and their respective requirements are summarised in Table 1.
Table 1: Network traffic types and their requirements
Traffic type
Example
Required bandwidth
Cell-delay
Latency
Constant
Voice, guaranteed circuit emulation
Minimal
Low
Variable
Compressed video
Guaranteed
Variable
Low
Available
Data
Not guaranteed
Widely variable
Variable
Computer networks
Many computer networks use a simple line code to transmit one type of signal using a medium's full bandwidth using its baseband (from zero through the highest frequency needed). Most versions of the popular Ethernet family are given names, such as the original 1980s 10BASE5, to indicate this. Networks that use cable modems on standard cable television
infrastructure are called broadband to indicate the wide range of
frequencies that can include multiple data users as well as traditional
television channels on the same cable. Broadband systems usually use a
different radio frequency modulated by the data signal for each band.
The total bandwidth of the medium is larger than the bandwidth of any channel.
The 10BROAD36 broadband variant of Ethernet was standardized by 1985, but was not commercially successful.
The DOCSIS standard became available to consumers in the late 1990s, to provide Internet access to cable television residential customers. Matters were further confused by the fact that the 10PASS-TS
standard for Ethernet ratified in 2008 used DSL technology, and both
cable and DSL modems often have Ethernet connectors on them.
TV and video
A television
antenna may be described as "broadband" because it is capable of
receiving a wide range of channels, while e.g. a low-VHF antenna is
"narrowband" since it receives only 1 to 5 channels. The U.S. federal
standard FS-1037C defines "broadband" as a synonym for wideband. "Broadband" in analogvideo distribution is traditionally used to refer to systems such as cable television, where the individual channels are modulated on carriers at fixed frequencies. In this context, baseband is the term's antonym, referring to a single channel of analog video, typically in composite form with separate baseband audio.
The act of demodulating converts broadband video to baseband video.
Fiber optic allows the signal to be transmitted farther without being
repeated. Cable companies use a hybrid system using fiber to transmit
the signal to neighborhoods and then changes the signal from light to
radio frequency to be transmitted over coaxial cable to homes. Doing so
reduces the use of having multiple head ends. A head end gathers all the information from the local cable networks and movie channels and then feeds the information into the system.
However, "broadband video" in the context of streaming Internet video has come to mean video files that have bit-rates high enough to require broadband Internet access for viewing. "Broadband video" is also sometimes used to describe IPTVVideo on demand.
Alternative technologies
Power lines have also been used for various types of data communication. Although some systems for remote control are based on narrowband signaling, modern high-speed systems use broadband signaling to achieve very high data rates. One example is the ITU-TG.hn standard, which provides a way to create a local area network
up to 1 Gigabit/s (which is considered high-speed as of 2014) using
existing home business and home wiring (including power lines, but also
phone lines and coaxial cables).
In the context of Internet access, the term "broadband" is used loosely to mean "access that is always on and faster than the traditional dial-up access".
A range of more precise definitions of speed have been prescribed at times, including:
"Greater than the primary rate" (which ranged from about 1.5 to 2 Mbit/s) —CCITT in "broadband service" in 1988.
"Internet access that is always on and faster than the traditional dial-up access" —US National Broadband Plan of 2009
Broadband Internet service in the United States was effectively treated or managed as a public utility by net neutrality rules until being overturned by the FCC in December 2017.
Speed qualifiers
A
number of national and international regulators categorize broadband
connections according to upload and download speeds, stated in Mbit/s (megabits per second).
Global bandwidth concentration: 3 countries have almost 50% between them; 10 countries almost 75%.
Bandwidth has historically been very unequally distributed worldwide,
with increasing concentration in the digital age. Historically only 10
countries have hosted 70–75% of the global telecommunication capacity
(see pie-chart Figure on the right).
In 2014, only three countries (China, the US, and Japan) host 50% of
the globally installed telecommunication bandwidth potential. The U.S.
lost its global leadership in terms of installed bandwidth in 2011,
being replaced by China, which hosts more than twice as much national
bandwidth potential in 2014 (29% versus 13% of the global total).
In the United States, net neutrality—the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) should make no distinctions between different kinds of content on the Internet, and to not discriminate based on such distinctions—has been an issue of contention between end-users and ISPs since the 1990s. With net neutrality, ISPs may not intentionally block, slow down, or charge different rates for specific online content.
Without net neutrality, ISPs may prioritize certain types of traffic,
meter others, or potentially block specific types of content, while
charging consumers different rates for that content.
A core issue to net neutrality is how ISPs should be classified under the Communications Act of 1934 as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996: as either Title I "information services" or Title II "common carrier services". The classification determines the Federal Communications Commission's
(FCC) authority over ISPs: the FCC would have significant ability to
regulate ISPs if classified as common carriers, but would have little
control over them if classified as information services. Because the
Communications Act has not been amended by Congress to account for ISPs,
the FCC has the authority to designate how ISPs are classified, as
affirmed by the Supreme Court in the case National Cable & Telecommunications Ass'n v. Brand X Internet Services
(2005), in addition to choosing what regulations to set on common
carriers. The five member FCC commission changes with each new
administration, and no more than three members may be of the same
political party, thus the FCC's attitudes and rule-making regarding net
neutrality shifts relatively frequently.
In the early 2000s, the FCC adopted a position that ISPs were
Title I information services, and proposed net neutrality principles via
the FCC Open Internet Order 2010. Courts ruled in Comcast v. FCC (2010) and Verizon v. FCC
(2014) that the FCC was not authorized to enforce these net neutrality
principles on Title I information services. Under FCC chair Tom Wheeler,
the FCC voted in the 2015 FCC open order to categorize ISPs as Title II
common carriers and thus subject to net neutrality principles, which
was upheld after a legal challenge raised by the ISP industry in United States Telecom Ass'n v. FCC in 2016.
During the Trump administration,
in 2017, the FCC reverted to handling ISPs as Title I information
services with some court-mandated leeway being given to state-level
legislation. In July 2021, President Joe Biden
called for the FCC to undo some of these changes. In April 2024, the
FCC voted 3-2 to restore net neutrality rules and regulation of Internet
service providers. In August 2024 a Federal court again blocked net neutrality rules.
Regulatory history
Early history 1980 – early 2000s
Major events related to net neutrality in the United States
The ideas underlying net neutrality have a long pedigree in
telecommunications practice and regulation. Services such as telegrams
and the phone network (officially, the public switched telephone network or PSTN) have been considered common carriers under U.S. law since the Mann–Elkins Act of 1910, which means that they have been akin to public utilities and expressly forbidden to give preferential treatment. The Communications Act of 1934 created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the industry and ensure fair pricing and access.
Different titles of the Act covered different modes of communication,
but primary focus on the debate of net neutrality has been on Titles I
and II. The Act distinguished between common carriers, who were bound
under Title II of the Act, and other telecommunication systems of the
time, covered broadly under Title I. Within Title II, common carriers
such as the phone networks were to be regulated by the FCC as to assure
reasonable pricing rates and non-discriminatory practices. Systems under
Title I were left to be unregulated by the FCC.
In the late 1980s the Internet became legally available for
commercial use, and in the early years of public use of the Internet,
this was its main use – public access was limited and largely reached
through dial-up modems (as was the Bulletin board system
dial-up culture that preceded it). The Internet was viewed more as a
commercial service than a domestic and societal system. However, by the
late 1990s and early 2000s, the Internet started to become common
in households and wider society. Also in the 1980s, arguments about the
public interest requirements of the telecommunications industry in the
U.S. arose; whether companies involved in broadcasting were best viewed
as community trustees, with obligations to society and consumers, or mere market participants with obligations only to their shareholders. The legal debate about net neutrality regulations of the 2000s echoes this debate.
By the 1990s, some U.S. politicians began to express concern over protecting the Internet:
How can government ensure that the
nascent Internet will permit everyone to be able to compete with
everyone else for the opportunity to provide any service to all willing
customers? Next, how can we ensure that this new marketplace reaches the
entire nation? And then how can we ensure that it fulfills the enormous
promise of education, economic growth, and job creation?
The Communications Act of 1934 was amended with the Telecommunications Act of 1996,
which besides other provisions, defined "information services" as "the
offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing,
transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available
information via telecommunications", and covered only under Title I
unregulated by the FCC.
In the early 2000s, legal scholars such as Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig
raised the issue of neutrality in a series of academic papers
addressing regulatory frameworks for packet networks. Wu is credited
with introducing the term "network neutrality" in his 2003 paper
"Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination".
Wu had found based on behaviors of broadband providers in the early
2000s that there could be potential for commercial interests to
interfere with natural evolution of new innovations on the Internet,
such as those using higher bandwidth like voice and video applications.
Wu outlined the benefits and drawbacks of governmental regulation for
net neutrality, writing "Communications regulators over the next decade
will spend increasing time on conflicts between the private interests of
broadband providers and the public’s interest in a competitive
innovation environment centered on the Internet."
Papers from Wu and others in the early 2000s sparked debate among
academics in information technology and legal areas to device possible
frameworks for net neutrality that could be applied within U.S. laws;
these discussions paralleled similar concurrent ones in Europe, though
due to its different governmental structure, took on different forms of
implementation. Within the U.S., media and politicians learned of these
regulatory suggestions, leading to the start of net neutrality
principles within the government.
Attempts at regulation under Title I information services (2000–2015)
Brand X and FCC's authority to classify services (2000–2005)
In the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the introduction
of "information services" under Title I prompted many cable-based
Internet access providers to urge the FCC to classify their services as
Title I information services, rather than as cable providers under the
Act's Title III which required them to provide open access to other
service provides. The FCC took in comments, and after providing its
initial findings in 2002, issued "Inquiry Concerning High-Speed Access
to the Internet over Cable and Other Facilities" in which it had
determined that cable ISPs were neither a telecommunications provider
(under Title II) nor a cable provider (under Title III) but were solely
an information service that fell under Title I and thus could operate
unregulated by the FCC.
Several non-cable ISPs and other industry groups sued the FCC,
challenging this ruling in multiple courts. The cases were consolidated
to the Ninth Circuit.
In May 2003, the Ninth Circuit vacated the FCC's ruling, stating that
cable ISPs had a telecommunications function and thus should be
regulated under Title II. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association challenged the ruling, and while the Ninth Circuit refused to rehear the case en banc,
the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The Court announced its
judgment in June 2005. The 6–3 decision reversed the Ninth Circuit's
ruling, deeming that the FCC had properly defined cable ISPs as an
information service. The majority opinion relied on the Chevron deference,
a principle that the judicial body gives deference to an executive
agency's interpretation of legislation outlining its granted powers as
long as that interpretation is reasonable and consistent. While the ruling was unfavorable for proponents of net neutrality, Brand X
established that the FCC had powers to classify Internet services
subject to their interpretation, which has played a key role in how net
neutrality has since played out in the United States with changing
administrations.
The majority opinion in Brand X was authored by Justice Clarence
Thomas, who has subsequently stated that he regrets the decision, in his
dissent to Baldwin v. United States.
FCC promotes freedom without regulation (2004)
In February 2004, then Federal Communications Commission
Chairman Michael Powell announced a set of non-discrimination
principles, which he called the principles of "Preserving Network
Freedom", based on studies from Tim Wu and Phil Weiser
and other academics from the previous years. Powell recognized that it
was still early to have a clear picture of what government regulation
should be for net neutrality, but agreed that based on practices of
broadband operators of the past few years, it was necessary to establish
what rights consumers should expect from broadband service. In a speech
at the Silicon Flatirons Symposium, Powell encouraged ISPs to offer
users these four freedoms:
Freedom to access content - Consumers should have access to their choice of legal content
Freedom to run applications - Consumers should be able to run applications of their choice
Freedom to attach devices - Consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes
Freedom to obtain service plan information - Consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans
In early 2005, in the Madison River case, the FCC for the
first time showed the willingness to enforce its network neutrality
principles by opening an investigation about Madison River
Communications, a local telephone carrier that was blocking Vonage's voice over IP (VoIP) service in its digital subscriber line
(DSL) offering to customers. At the time, while the FCC classified
cable providers under Title I as an information provider (as per the Brand X
case) and were unregulated, services such as DSL were still considered
under Title II as a common carrier, and were bound by non-discriminatory
regulation from the FCC.
Nevertheless, the FCC's investigation led to a settlement between the
FCC and Madison River Communications before any further litigation
occurred, with Madison River agreeing to stop blocking VoIP traffic and
paying a $15,000 fine.
While the action did not set any precedent for the FCC's stance on net
neutrality, the Madison River case was an indication the agency was
willing to uphold Powell's principles.
Shortly after the case was settled, the FCC issued a new rule in 2005
to reclassified DSL as a Title I information service and allowing them
to operate unregulated by the FCC.
CLEC, dial-up, and DSL deregulation (2004–2005)
In 2004, the court case USTA v. FCC voided the FCC's authority to enforce rules requiring telephone operators to unbundle certain parts of their networks at regulated prices. This caused the economic collapse of many competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC).
In the United States, broadband services were historically
regulated differently according to the technology by which they were
carried. While cable Internet has always been classified by the FCC as
an information service free of most regulation, DSL was regulated as a telecommunications service. In 2005, the FCC reclassified Internet access across the phone network, including DSL, as "information service" relaxing the common carrier regulations and unbundling requirement.
During the FCC's hearing, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association
urged the FCC to adopt the four criteria laid out in its 2005 Internet
Policy Statement as the requisite openness. This made up a voluntary set
of four net neutrality principles. Implementation of the principles was not mandatory; that would require an FCC rule or federal law. The modified principles were as follows:
Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and
Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.
In December 2006, the AT&T/Bell South merger agreement defined
net neutrality as an agreement on the part of the broadband provider:
"not to provide or to sell to Internet content, application or service
providers ... any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes any
(data) packet transmitted over AT&T/BellSouth's wireline broadband
Internet access service based on its source, ownership or destination."
In 2007, Comcast, the largest cable company in the US, was found to be blocking or severely delaying BitTorrent uploads on their network using a technique which involved creating 'reset' packets (TCP RST) that appeared to come from the other party. An August 2007 report by TorrentFreak (based on substantial nationwide research led by chief researcher Andrew Norton)
noted that ISPs had been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two
years, since 2005, but Comcast was completely blocking it in at least
some cases. This was later verified by both the EFF and Associated Press.
On March 27, 2008, Comcast and BitTorrent reached an agreement to work
together on network traffic where Comcast was to adopt a
protocol-neutral stance "as soon as the end of [2008]", and explore ways
to "more effectively manage traffic on its network at peak times."
In December 2009, Comcast reached an out-of-court settlement of a class
action lawsuit for US$16 million, admitting no wrongdoing and amounting to no more than US$16 per affected account.
In August 2008, the FCC made its first Internet network management decision.
It voted 3-to-2 to uphold a complaint against Comcast ruling that it
had illegally inhibited users of its high-speed Internet service from
using file-sharing software because it throttled the bandwidth available to certain customers for video files to ensure that other customers had adequate bandwidth.
The FCC imposed no fine, but required Comcast to end such blocking in
the year 2008, ordered Comcast to disclose the details of its network
management practices within 30 days, submit a compliance plan for ending
the offending practices by the end of the year, and disclose to the
public the details of intended future practices. Then-FCC chairman Kevin J. Martin
said the order was meant to set a precedent, that Internet providers
and all communications companies could not prevent customers from using
their networks the way they see fit, unless there is a good reason. In
an interview Martin stated that "We are preserving the open character of
the Internet" and "We are saying that network operators can't block
people from getting access to any content and any applications."
In two rulings, in April and June 2010 respectively, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
ruled against the FCC; the April ruling denied to grant the FCC's
request for a cease-and-desist order against Comcast related to
BitTorrent transfers, while the June ruling vacated the FCC's order
against Comcast. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC has no
powers to regulate any Internet provider's network, or the management of
its practices: "[the FCC] 'has failed to tie its assertion' of regulatory authority to an actual law enacted by Congress",
and that the FCC lacked the authority under Title I to force ISPs to
keep their networks open, while employing reasonable network management
practices, to all forms of legal content. In wake of the rulings, the FCC stated it would continue its fight for net neutrality.
FCC's conditions for spectrum auction (2008)
In February 2008, Kevin Martin, then Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission,
said that he is "ready, willing and able," to prevent broadband ISPs
from unreasonably interfering with their subscribers' access to content
on the internet.
Open applications: Consumers should be able to download and use any software application, content, or services they desire;
Open devices: Consumers should be able to use a handheld communications device with whatever.. wireless network they prefer;
Open services: Third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire
wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on
reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms;
Open networks: Third parties, such as Internet service providers,
should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a
700 MHz licensee's wireless network.
These conditions were broadly similar to the FCC's Internet Policy
Statement; FCC's applications and content were combined into a single
bullet, and an extra bullet requiring wholesale access for third party
providers was included. The FCC adopted only two of these four criteria
for the auction, viz., open devices and open applications, and only
applied these conditions to the nationwide C block portion of the band.
Towards the end of 2009, the FCC began drafting new rules that would
include a series of proposals that would prevent telecommunications,
cable and wireless companies from blocking certain information on the
Internet. FCC Chair Julius Genachowski
proposed to add two rules to the current FCC policy statement in 2005,
viz., the nondiscrimination principle that ISPs must not discriminate
against any content or applications, and the transparency principle,
requiring that ISPs disclose all their policies to customers. He argued
that wireless should be subject to the same network neutrality as
wireline providers. In October 2009, the FCC gave notice of proposed rule making on net neutrality.
Following the ruling in Comcast v. FCC in March 2010, the
FCC amended these rules to account for the court's decision. The FCC
voted in December 2010 to approve the FCC Open Internet Order banning
cable television and telephone service providers from preventing access
to competitors or certain web sites. The order established six net
"neutrality principles" that would apply to ISPs:
Transparency: Consumers and innovators have a right to know the
basic performance characteristics of their Internet access and how their
network is being managed;
No blocking: This includes a right to send and receive lawful
traffic, prohibits the blocking of lawful content, apps, services and
the connection of non-harmful devices to the network;
Level playing field: Consumers and innovators have a right to a
level playing field. This means a ban on unreasonable content
discrimination. There is no approval for so-called "pay for priority"
arrangements involving fast lanes for some companies but not others;
Network management: This is an allowance for broadband providers to
engage in reasonable network management. These rules do not forbid
providers from offering subscribers tiers of services or charging based
on bandwidth consumed;
Mobile: The provisions adopted today do not apply as strongly to
mobile devices, though some provisions do apply. Of those that do are
the broadly applicable rules requiring transparency for mobile broadband
providers and prohibiting them from blocking websites and certain
competitive applications;
Vigilance: The order creates an open Internet advisory committee to
assist the commission in monitoring the state of Internet openness and
the effects of the rules.
The 2010 orders did not reclassify ISPs under Title II common
carriers, leaving them unregulated by the FCC under Title I information
services as a cumulative result of past FCC orders.
The measure was denounced by net neutrality advocates as a capitulation
to telecommunication companies such as allowing them to discriminate on
transmission speed for their profit, especially on mobile devices like
the iPad, while pro-business advocates complained about any regulation of the Internet at all.
While the 2010 Open Internet Order was generally favorable to ISPs,
the issuing of the neutrality principles that would still apply to Title
I information services was criticized by some ISPs. Verizon Communications challenged the order at the D.C. Circuit
court in early 2011, asserting that the FCC had overstepped its
authority by applying principles to Title I information services. The
D.C. Circuit ruled in January 2014 to vacate the blocking and
discrimination principles from the 2010 Open Internet Order while
upholding other parts. The decision determined that the FCC improperly
relied on Section 706 of the amended Communications Act, which gives the
FCC authority to incentivize the deployment of telecommunications
services to all Americans including those in rural and low-income areas.
The FCC had relied on Section 706's language that they had authority to
"promulgate rules governing broadband providers’ treatment of Internet
traffic" to apply these rules to Title I information services. The Court
ruled that ISPs were still specifically treated as Title I information
services by the FCC, and for the FCC to be able to regulate aspects like
blocking or discrimination, they would specifically have to be
cataloged as telecommunication common carriers under Title II. The court
agreed that FCC can regulate broadband in a general manner and may
craft more specific rules that stop short of identifying service
providers as common carriers.
As a response to the DC Circuit Court's decision, a dispute
developed as to whether net neutrality could be guaranteed under
existing law, or if reclassification of ISPs was needed to ensure net
neutrality.
Wheeler stated that the FCC had the authority under Section 706 of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996 to regulate ISPs, while others, including
President Obama, supported reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Critics of Section 706 point out that the section has no clear mandate to guarantee equal access to content
provided over the internet, while subsection 202(a) of the
Communications Act states that common carriers cannot "make any unjust
or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications,
regulations, facilities, or services." Advocates of net neutrality have
generally supported reclassifying ISPs under Title II, while FCC
leadership and ISPs have generally opposed such reclassification. The
FCC stated that if they reclassified ISPs as common carriers, the
commission would selectively enforce Title II, so that only sections
relating to broadband would apply to ISPs.
Reclassification as Title II common carriers (2015–2017)
Policy proposals (2014)
Users
with faster Internet connectivity (e.g., fiber) abandon a slow-loading
video at a faster rate than users with slower Internet connectivity
(e.g., cable or mobile). A "fast lane" in the Internet can irrevocably decrease the user's tolerance to the relative slowness of the "slow lane".
On February 19, 2014, the FCC announced plans to formulate new rules
to resume enforcing net neutrality while complying with the court
rulings. However, in the event, on April 23, 2014, the FCC reported a new draft rule that would permit broadband ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon to offer content providers, such as Netflix, Disney, or Google, willing to pay a higher price, faster connection speeds, so their customers would have preferential access, thus reversing its earlier position and (so far as opinion outside the ISP sector generally agreed) would deny net neutrality.
Public response was heated, pointing out FCC chairman Tom Wheeler's
past as a president and CEO of two major ISP-related organizations, and
the suspicion of bias towards the profit-motives of ISPs as a result.
Shortly afterwards, during late April 2014, the contours of a document
leaked that indicated that the FCC under Wheeler would consider
promulgating rules allowing Internet service providers (ISPs) to violate net neutrality principles by making it easier for Internet
users to access certain content — whose owners paid fees to the ISPs
(including cable companies and wireless ISPs) — and harder to access
other content,
thus undermining the traditional open architecture of the Internet.
These plans received substantial backlash from activists, the mainstream
press, and some other FCC commissioners. In May 2014, over 100 Internet companies — including Google, Microsoft, eBay, and Facebook
— signed a letter to Wheeler voicing their disagreement with his plans,
saying they represented a "grave threat to the Internet".
The FCC voted 3–2 on proposed rules to introduced tiered broadband allowances on May 15, 2014.
Besides opening these rules to public comment prior to issuing a final
ruling, the FCC asked the public on their opinion in regards to
classifying ISPs as Title II common carrier telecommunication services.
The public commenting period ran through July 2014, and garnering over one million responses, the most the FCC had ever received for rulemaking.
The FCC proposal for a tiered Internet received heavy criticism.
Opponents argued that a user accessing content over the "fast lane" on
the Internet would find the "slow lane" intolerable in comparison,
greatly disadvantaging any content provider who is unable to pay for
"fast lane" access. They argued that a tiered Internet would suppress
new Internet innovations by increasing the barrier to entry. Video
providers Netflix and Vimeo in their comments filed with the FCC used the research of S.S. Krishnan and Ramesh Sitaraman that provided quantitative evidence of the impact of Internet speed on online video users.
Their research studied the patience level of millions of Internet video
users who waited for a slow-loading video to start playing. Users with
faster Internet connectivity, such as fiber-to-the-home, demonstrated
less patience and abandoned their videos sooner than similar users with
slower Internet connectivity.
Opponents of the tiered broadband rules declared September 10,
2014, to be the "Internet slowdown". Participating websites were
purposely slowed down to show what they felt would happen if the new
rules took effect. Websites that participated in the Internet slowdown
included Netflix, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo and Kickstarter. The Economist
described the "Battle for the Net [...] now casting the upcoming FCC
decision as an epic clash between "Team Internet" (a plucky band of
high-tech multi-millionaires) and "Team Cable" (a dastardly bunch of
Big-ISP billionaires)."
On November 10, 2014, President Obama stepped in, and recommended the FCC reclassify broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service in order to preserve net neutrality. Republicans presented legislation in January 2015 in the form of a U. S. CongressHRdiscussion draft bill
that made concessions to net neutrality but prohibited the FCC from
accomplishing that goal, or from enacting any further regulation
affecting ISPs, though the bill failed to be enacted.
2015 Open Internet Order
By
January 2015, the FCC announced it had revised its prior rules and
would be voting on a new preliminary ruling that defined ISPs as a Title
II common carrier telecommunication service, with some necessary
exemptions.Adoption of this notion would reclassify Internet service from one of information to one of telecommunications, treating it as a public good, and ensure net neutrality, according to Wheeler.
Ahead of the FCC's vote on these new rules, social media
platforms had a large role on engaging the public in the debate
surrounding net neutrality. Popular websites such as Tumblr, Vimeo, and
Reddit also participated in the Internet slowdown on September 10, 2014,
which the organization said was the largest sustained (lasting more
than a single day) online protest effort in history.
On January 26, 2015, popular blogging site Tumblr placed links to group
Fight For The Future, a net neutrality advocacy group. The website
displayed a countdown to the FCC vote on Title II on February 26, 2015.
This was part of a widespread Internet campaign to sway congressional
opinion and encourage users to call or submit comments to congressional
representatives. Net neutrality advocacy groups such as Save the Internet coalition and Battle for the Net responded to the 2015 FCC ruling by calling for defense of the new net neutrality rules.
The FCC voted 3–2 on February 25, 2015, to pass these new rules, making exemptions for North Carolina and Tennessee
where state laws had already established stronger net neutrality
concepts, and would be willing to add exemptions for other states with
similar laws.
In response to ISP and opponent views, Wheeler commented, "This is no
more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan
to regulate free speech. They both stand for the same concept." Full disclosure of the rules were released for public comment on March 12, 2015, and the final rule was published on April 13, 2015.
Following the publication of the FCC's ruling in 2015, several
internet providers filed suit to challenge the FCC's ruling. The cases
were combined into a single case, United States Telecom Ass'n v. FCC 825 F.3d 674 (2016), heard by a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in December 2015.
The court issued its decision in June 2016, with the panel split 2-1 in
favor of maintaining the FCC's ruling, stating that the Internet should
be treated as a utility and not as a luxury. Internet providers
signaled their intent to continue to challenge this ruling to the
Supreme Court.
Several of the telecom groups petitioned the Supreme Court for writ of certiorari following the Court of Appeals ruling, ultimately falling under the case name Berninger v. Federal Communications Commission
(Docket 17-489). The petition argued that the FCC did not have the
power to issue the Open Internet Order, which required a
re-interpretation of the Communications Act of 1934, under the Chevron
deference. On November 5, 2018, seven members of the Court denied the
petition, leaving in place the Court of Appeals ruling, which
established that the FCC had the ability to reclassify Internet under
Title II. Chief Justice John Roberts abstained due to financial conflict, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh abstained due to his previous involvement with the case history. Three Justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch had recommended accepting the petition as to order a Munsingwear
vacatur, in which the Appeals Court order would have been vacated,
returned to that court, and have the case rendered moot due to the more
recent 2018 FCC order that reversed the Open Internet Order.
Rollback to Title I information services under the Trump administration (2017–2020)
Restoring Internet Freedom proposed rules
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (center) has been at the forefront of the recent rollback of net neutrality rules.
Donald Trump
had been positioning himself for running for presidency as the FCC
considered net neutrality and categorizing ISPs as Title II common
carriers. He said in 2014, "Obama’s attack on the internet is another
top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will
target conservative media."
Shortly after his inauguration in January 2017, President Trump appointed Ajit Pai
as the new chairman of the FCC. Pai had previously been nominated to
fill one of the required Republican seats on the commission by President
Obama under the recommendation of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Pai, who objected to the 2015 Open Internet Order, quickly began to
roll back some of the policies that had been implemented by the FCC
during the Obama administration, and halted an investigation into the use of zero-rating
by U.S. wireless providers. After his appointment, Pai stated that he
planned to "modernize" FCC policies to "match the reality of the modern
marketplace", but was unsure over whether the FCC would continue to
enforce the net neutrality rules or Title II classification of broadband
services established in the 2015 Open Internet Order.
Pai stated his opposition to the current net neutrality rules as they
were "regulating against hypothetical harms", rather than trying to
correct actual anti-competitive behavior, and that there was no need for
such wide-spread government intervention when there were only a few
companies that may be harming consumers or innovators.Pai argued that net neutrality rules also would "prohibit a number of
pro-competitive business arrangements" and "would reduce investments"
into extending the Internet infrastructure.
By April 2017, Pai had indicated that the FCC would likely propose to
roll back the 2015 Open Internet Order, reverting the classification of
ISPs as Title II common carriers, and instead have ISPs to "voluntarily"
commit to net neutrality principles, with violations to be covered by
the Federal Trade Commission rather than the FCC. On April 29, 2017, a clearer understanding of the latest net neutrality compromise proposal was described.
Broadband capital expenditures by U.S. broadband providers ($ billions, 1996–2015)
On May 18, 2017, the FCC voted 2–1 to move forward with Pai's Notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on "Restoring Internet freedom" rules by rolling back net neutrality regulations. The new rules were published for public viewing on July 17, 2017. The FCC supported their rules by arguing that the classification of ISPs as Title II carriers had caused them to reduce their capital expenditures in new infrastructure, threatening the future of the nation's telecommunication systems. The FCC cited a drop of approximately $1 billion in capital spending by telecoms between 2014 and 2015, based on data from the United States Telecom Association and similar figures from industry consultant Hal Singer,
to demonstrate this. Analysts stated that the FCC had cherry picked
this data, as about 75% of the annual changes in capital spending by
telecoms between the period of 1996 to 2015 were decreases of at least $1 billion. In her dissent to this NPRM, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn
wrote, "I have yet to see a credible analysis that suggests that
broadband provider capital expenditures have declined as a result of our
2015 Open Internet Order. ... Using the same logic that the
NPRM uses, one could suggest that the FCC's classification of cable
modem service as an information service in 2002 resulted in an even more
precipitous drop in broadband provider investment.”
Ernesto Falcon, Legislative Council for the Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed that no such claims of CapEx reductions have been made in official reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC),
He said that major companies can be sued by investors who assert that
they lost money because of misleading information in an SEC filing, and
no such penalties apply to potentially misleading statements to Congress
or the public. Falcon's claim is supported by an analysis by Turner of Free Press
in a report that includes 26 figures and tables, 21 of which were
extracted from SEC filings and three of the remaining five came from the
U.S. Census Bureau's Annual Capital Expenditures Survey.
The change since the Title II Order was negative for only 5 of Turner's
24 tables, and the mean and median change over the 24 tables for which
it seemed reasonable to extract a typical annualized percentage change
were 8.1% and 5.2%, respectively.
Public commenting period and analysis of fraudulent activities
As
required for any NPRM, a period for public commenting on the FCC's new
proposed rules ran from May 18 to August 16, 2017. During the public
commenting period, efforts were made by pro-net neutrality groups to get
people to submit comments to the FCC in opposition to the new rules. John Oliver, the host of Last Week Tonight, encouraged his viewers to comment against the proposed FCC rules. In early June 2017, Battle for the Net, a coalition spearheaded by Fight for the Future, Free Press Action Fund, and Demand Progress, announced a "massive day of action" for July 12. Over 50,000 websites, including multinational corporations, participated in what Fight for the Future called "the largest online protest in history".
The FCC's open comment period on the proposed language of
"Restoring Internet Freedom" received about 21.9 million comments, the
largest influx of public comments seen by the FCC at that time; previously the FCC had gotten about 500,000 comments related to new media ownership rules in 2003 and 1.4 million comments from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy in 2004.
As these comments were made available to the public, third-party groups
began analyzing their contents, recognizing many comments that were
against net neutrality shared the same language, and were considered to
be duplicative. Analysis suggested that millions of these comments were
fraudulent, using the same anti-net neutrality wording that had been
proposed by the Center for Individual Freedom.
One of the first studies performed after the closure of the
public commenting period, done on behalf of Broadband for America, which
sought to repeal the Obama-era rules, found that 60% of the comments
were in favor of retaining the current rules. However, the study also
identified a large number of duplicate comments; if these were taken
out, the unique comments favoring retaining the current rules far
outweighed those seeking repeal, 1.52 million to 23,000.
During and after the public commenting period, analysts reviewed the
public comments and observed that a significant proportion of those
using boilerplate language in support of repealing the rules had used
names and addresses off known spam databases, and of those who were
willing and able to be contacts asserts they left no such comment for
the FCC.
At least twenty-four people listed by the FCC as giving anti-net
neutrality comments signed an open letter to the FCC in May 2017
requesting the comments they were asserted to have made to be removed
from public record. The FCC's system for public comments, the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS), came under scrutiny: it uses an open application programming interface (API), along keys to that provided by the FCC, to submit comments, making it exploitable for mass-messaging.
In December 2017, the Pew Research Center
issued its report in reviewing the comments, affirming that most of
them were boilerplate messages, but representative of a mass campaign
attempting to sway public policy. The Pew report did recognize that
several of the names were nonsensical, such as variations of "John
Smith", or used "The Internet", and in other cases, thousands of
messages were received at nearly the same time, potential evidence of a
bot spamming in comments.
Another study evaluating all the comments submitted by the process was completed at Stanford University
and published in October 2018. The Stanford study forced solely on
unique comments, resulting in more than 800,000 comments that were
called "semantic outliers" in contrast to boilerplate language, and in a
detailed review of a sampling of one thousand of these, found that
99.7% favored retaining the Obama-era rules; these came from a
geographically- and politically-diverse set of users. Shortly after this study, New York State's Attorney GeneralBarbara Underwood,
one of the critics of the FCC's process, issued a subpoena to over a
dozen advocacy groups on both sides of the net neutrality debate to
determine if they had a role in the massive number of fraudulent
comments left at the FCC's system. Other states, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have issued similar subpoenas on the commenting period.
Both The New York Times and BuzzFeed had filed Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) requests to the FCC to gain information on the IP addresses used
in the public comment period. The FCC denied the requests in December
2018 citing that releasing this information would leave the US
vulnerable to a cyberattack, and Pai wrote in an attached statement that
at least 500,000 of the comments were tied to Russian addresses,
interfering in the process and trying to swing the public opinion in
favor of keeping the Obama-era net neutrality rules.
A separate FOIA request was made by The New York Times as well as the website Gizmodo
for records pertaining to the API key logs from the ECFS, which were
granted after journalists from the works filed suit against the FCC's
initial denial. Data analysis led by The New York Times and Gizmodo
to review the logs against those of the duplicated comments. They
concluded that the duplicated comments were coming from submissions
through the API assigned to CQ Roll Call, which does offer advocacy software to clients for this purpose. Gizmodo
found the comments tied to the name of those that had signed the May
2017 open letter to the FCC, matching this pattern. Separately, Gizmodo found the language of the duplicated comments shares many similarities with statements made by the Center for Individual Freedom
(CFIF), which had been outspoken against net neutrality of the page.
Due to these investigations, CQ Roll Call, CFIF, and several other
advocacy groups with access to CQ Roll Call's had been called for
questioning within the New York State case against the FCC. In May 2020, Judge Lorna G. Schofield of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the FCC must provide The New York Times
the IP addresses of all the comments from this commenting period. Judge
Schofield stated that despite the FCC's claims of privacy issues, the
request by the newspaper was valid to examine if any fraudulent activity
interfered during the public commenting period towards the issue if the
FCC's decision to repeal was "vulnerable to corruption".
The New York state attorney general's office reported in May 2021
that after evaluating the comments, they determined that about 18
million of the 21.9 million submitted were bogus. About 8.5 million of
those comments were tied to co-registration promotions put forth by the
telecom industry, promising consumers gift cards or entry into
sweepstakes but then using their names and information to submit the
comments without their knowledge. For this, the office had already
reached settlement deals with three telecom companies for a total of $4 million
in fines. Another 9.3 million of the comments considered bogus were in
favor of net neutrality, according to the report, filed under false
identities and many submitted by a single person. The attorney general also obtained a total of US$650,000 from three influencer companies paid by the telecom industry that participated in the millions of fake responses.
Enactment of the new order
Despite
the ongoing analysis into fraudulent activities related to the public
commenting period, and that the public comments that were deemed
legitimate that weighed in favor of maintaining the 2015 Open Internet
Order, the FCC announced in November 2017 that it was planning to go
ahead with a final vote on December 14, 2017, to vote in the Restore
Internet Freedom order and repeal the net neutrality rules. FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel alleged on December 8 that the FCC was withholding evidence of fraud due to irregularities in its comment period and said the vote should be postponed until after an appropriate investigation.
Many organizations involved in the July 12 Day of Action planned an online protest for December 12. A vote was held on December 14, 2017, with a 3–2 party-line vote approving the repeal.
On January 4, 2018, the current version of "Restoring Internet freedom" was made public, and was officially codified in the Federal Register on February 22, 2018, with the rules taking effect on June 11, 2018.
The FCC voted along party lines, 3–2, on December 14, 2017, to
enact the Restoring Internet freedom rules and repeal the 2015 Open
Internet Order.
Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia, led by New York's Schneiderman, filed a formal suit in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
against the FCC's ruling on January 16, 2018, calling it "arbitrary,
capricious, and an abuse of discretion", and that the FCC mis-classified
Internet access as a Title I service rather than Title II due to "an
erroneous and unreasonable interpretation" of laws around communication
services.
The initial filing was withdrawn in early February 2018 only due to the
fact that the FCC's ruling had not yet been published within the Federal Register. Once the new FCC rules were published in February 2018, the states, District of Columbia, joined by the Mozilla Foundation and Vimeo, and several other state and local entities and advocacy groups, refiled the suit on February 22, 2018. The cases were all consolidated under the title Mozilla v. FCC.
The FCC issued its defense on October 12, 2018, requesting the
Court to reject the lawsuit, as the lawsuit filed brings "no substantial
reason to second-guess the commission’s decision to eliminate rules
that the agency has determined are both unlawful and unwise". Initial court hearings were held on February 1, 2019. The FCC had requested a rescheduling of the hearings due to lack of resources created by the ongoing shutdown of the government, but this request was denied by the D.C. District Court.
At the hearing before three judges, the states challenging the FCC not
only discussed the issues related to net neutrality, but also charged
the FCC with selectively reviewing the public comments to come to its
decision, thus "failed in its responsibility to engage in reasoned
decision-making".
ISPs argued the need to have an unregulated approach to providing
high-quality services to their users, and that they would not be able to
offer anything less than the full Internet to users given the
competitive landscape.
The Court of Appeals issued its decision on October 1, 2019. In a
multipart decision, the Court ruled that the FCC has the capability to
reclassify Internet service under Title I based on the prior Brand X ruling from the Supreme Court, allowing its 2017 rule change to stand.
However, the opinion stated that the FCC had "disregard of its duty" in
evaluating the impact of net neutrality on public safety, using the
example of throttled communications that impacted the capabilities of
first responders during the 2018 Camp Fire.
The opinion also stated that the FCC had not addressed how these rules
affected utility pole access or other programs like the low-income Lifeline program.
The Court did rule against the FCC, vacating the rule's limitations
against state-level actions to enforce net neutrality as Congress had
not given the FCC any such authority via the Telecommunications Act. While various parts in support of the plaintiffs requested an en banc hearing from the full Court of Appeals, the Court denied this in February 2020.
2018 US Senate vote
In January 2018, fifty United States senators endorsed legislative action under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to reverse the repeal of Title II net neutrality. While the effort was pushed by Democratic Senators, they had also gained support of three Republican Senators, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John Kennedy. The motion to restore net neutrality passed in the Senate on May 16, 2018.
However, efforts for the House of Representatives to pass similar
legislative action through the CRA had stalled; Democratic
Representatives had attempted to gain sufficient signatures for a discharge petition to force the vote on the matter, but by June 2018, were still 46 signatures short, principally along partisan lines.
While the revised FCC order repealing net neutrality has become
official as of June 11, 2018, the House could have taken action to
reverse the decision, but even with CRA passage, the action would have
to be signed into law by the President. However, the Congressional term ended before the House of Representatives could act, preventing the CRA challenge.
While various states have enacted versions of net neutrality laws,
these mostly have been working within the established parameters set by
the FCC. In the FCC's rollback, the ruling includes language that
asserts states do not have authority to override the FCC decision. Legal
experts believe this clause to be flawed and would allow states to
still override the FCC's decision on net neutrality, as the language
divests the FCC from regulating broadband carriers, and thus would
disallow them from preventing states from regulating them.
Following the FCC's revocation of all net neutrality protections,
California State Senator Scott Wiener introduced SB822, which
comprehensively restored all of the protections of the 2015 Open
Internet Order. The bill passed with bi-partisan support in both the
State Assembly and State Senate, and on September 30, 2018, Governor Jerry Brown
signed it into law. On the same day as it was signed, the US Department
of Justice sued the state of California to stop the law, arguing that
Congress granted the FCC the sole authority to create rules for
broadband internet providers. A few days later, four lobbying groups that represent the major United States terrestrial and mobile communication carriers, United States Telecom Association, CTIA, NCTA
and the American Cable Association, also sued the state of California
for similar reasons as the Justice Department, claiming that the state
does not have authority to regulate Internet providers.
The state and the FCC announced on October 26, 2018, that they have
reached agreement for California to hold off the enforcement of the law
until pending legal action over the FCC's decision. Despite not being
enforced, the bill went into effect on January 1, 2019.
With the October 2019 decision in Mozilla v. FCC that
overturned the 2017 Order's blanket ban on state net neutrality, the
U.S. government and the ISP trade groups restarted their lawsuit in
August 2020 and are seeking a preliminary injunction to block
enforcement of California's law until the case is concluded. However, following the election of Joe Biden
as president in 2021, Biden's new Department of Justice withdrew from
the challenge, leaving the ISP trade groups to continue the suit.
Subsequently, the judge denied the preliminary injunction in a ruling
on February 23, 2021, allowing the California law to go into effect, on
the basis that the ISP trade groups will be unlikely to prevail in the
challenge.
The Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously in January 2022 that California's
net neutrality law may continue to be enforced and cannot be overridden
by the FCC as, current as of the decision, Internet services were
classified as information services. The trade groups abandoned the case against the law by May 2022.
Save the Internet Act (2019)
Democratic
Senators and Representatives presented the Save the Internet Act in
both Houses of Congress in early March 2019. The Act, if passed, would
rescind the 2017 FCC order to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order,
codify the 2015 Open Internet Order into law, and prevent the FCC from
making any similar changes baring any further change in law. Republican
lawmakers indicated they felt this was too extreme and were unlikely to
give support to the bill.
The bill cleared the House on a 232–190 vote on April 10, 2019, but
both leaders in the Republican-controlled Senate and then-president
Trump indicated they would stop the bill's passage.
Under the Biden administration (2021–present)
With Joe Biden becoming president in January 2021, Ajit Pai announced his departure from the FCC in the same month. Biden named Jessica Rosenworcel,
an Obama-era appointee to the FCC, as acting chairperson. Rosenworcel
was a vocal proponent for net neutrality in previous FCC rulings.
On July 9, 2021, Biden signed Executive Order 14036,
"Promoting Competition in the American Economy", a sweeping array of
initiatives across the executive branch. Among them included
instructions to the FCC to restore the net neutrality rules that had
been undone during the Trump administration.
The resignation of Pai in January 2021 left the FCC at a two-two deadlock until September 2023, when Biden-nominated Anna M. Gomez
was sworn in as the Commission's fifth member. Rosenworcel stated that
month that the FCC plans to re-introduce net neutrality rules.
While it is expected for the FCC to rule to restore net neutrality, a
white paper published by telecom legal experts in 2023 warned that the
rule will likely face challenges in the Supreme Court under the major questions doctrine.
The FCC voted 3-2 on October 19, 2023, to approve issuing a Notice of
Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking comments about rolling back to the
2015 rules. The commenting period was closed on January 18, 2024.
The FCC voted in these proposed guidelines on April 25, 2024, on a 3-2
vote, returning Internet services under Title II, enforcing net
neutrality. Providers under the NCTA filed suit to challenge the new rule in June
2024. Under the suit, the providers questioned whether the FCC has the
authority to reclassify broadband services. While this had been settled
by previous cases like Brand X the Chevron deference central to these cases was overturned in June 2024 by Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, leaving in question the capability of the FCC the ability to enforce its net neutrality decision
The Sixth Circuited granted a temporary injunction against the new net
neutrality rules in July 2024, with a hearing to determine if a
permanent injunction is necessary at an August hearing.
On extending the stay in August 2024, the majority of the Sixth Circuit
stated that due to the flip-flopping on how the FCC has classified
internet services, it will be highly unlikely for the FCC to prevail
using the weaker Skidmore deference.
Timeline of significant events
January 12, 2003 – Columbia University law professor Tim Wu coins the phrase network neutrality in a paper calling for anti-discrimination rules to be applied to internet service providers.
June 27, 2005 – Supreme Court decides that “communications, content,
and applications are allowed to pass freely over the Internet's
broadband pipes.”
September 1, 2007 – Comcast begins interfering with Bittorrent traffic on its network.
January 9, 2008 – FCC investigates Comcast traffic policy and treatment of Bittorrent traffic.
August 9, 2010 – Google and Verizon try to cut deal to make larger
parts of internet to be exempt from protection from the net neutrality
rules from the FCC.
December 21, 2010 – FCC creates Open Internet Rules
which “established high-level rules requiring transparency and
prohibiting blocking and unreasonable discrimination to protect Internet
openness.”
September 23, 2011 – The Federal Register publishes the Open Internet Rules.
May 13, 2014 – FCC releases new proposal including new rules on allowing “fast lanes and slow lanes online.”
June 13, 2014 – FCC investigates large companies such as Netflix for interconnection policies.
July 15, 2014 – FCC opens up on Public Knowledge for public
comments, received 1.1 million comments on the first day. Determined
that "less than 1% of comments were clearly opposed to net neutrality."
September 15, 2014 – FCC receives 3.7 million comments in total.
“The FCC's server crashes again as millions more people, companies, and
advocacy organizations weigh in on the open internet rules.”
February 26, 2015 – FCC passes the Title II Net Neutrality Rules.
“In a 3–2 party-line vote, the FCC passes open internet rules applying
to both wired and wireless internet connections grounded in Title II
authority.”
June 12, 2015 – Net neutrality rules go into effect.
January 23, 2017 – President Trump names Ajit Pai as new FCC chairman.
April 26, 2017 – FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announces plan to reverse Title II regulations.
May 1, 2017 – A U.S. appeals court declined to reconsider a rehearing of the FCC's net neutrality case.
May 18, 2017 – The FCC voted 2–1 to start rolling back net
neutrality regulations; this vote marked the beginning of a lengthy
process required to modify the existing rules, and it did not actually
change said rules.
June 6, 2017 – Amazon, Reddit, Netflix and many other internet organizations announce that they will hold a simultaneous "Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality" on July 12 in a final attempt to convince the Republican-controlled FCC to keep the current net neutrality rules.
July 12, 2017 – The net neutrality 'day of action' occurred,
involving many major companies and the original founder of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee.
July 17, 2017 – Comment Date for "Restoring Internet freedom" NPRM.
August 30, 2017 – Reply Comment Date for "Restoring Internet freedom" NPRM.
November 21, 2017 – FCC chairman Ajit Pai unveils plans to repeal
the net neutrality policy in the United States. The five person FCC vote
for repeal is scheduled for December 14, 2017.
December 14, 2017 – The FCC votes 3 to 2, along party lines, in favor of reversing Title II regulations.
February 22, 2018—The "Restoring Internet Freedom" ruling was
published in the Federal Register, giving opponents of the FCC's
decision 60 legislative days from that date to nullify it under the Congressional Review Act (CRA).
May 16, 2018 – The US Senate passes CRA resolution on a 52–47 vote in an attempt to stop the repeal from going forward.
June 11, 2018 – With the US House of Representatives failing to act under the CRA, the repeal of the FCC's rules took effect.
September 30, 2018 - California passed regulations for Net
Neutrality protections. The Trump administration swiftly filed a lawsuit
stating that the regulations "interfere with the federal government's
approach to the Internet."
June 25, 2019 - Maine governor signs net neutrality bill. Bill
states that internet service providers can only receive state funding if
they "agree to provide net neutral service."
October 2, 2019 - California governor signs bill AB-1699. The bill
allows first response agencies to request, that mobile service providers
not limit, or degrade, internet traffic of accounts used by the agency
in response to emergencies.
October 27, 2020 - The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) votes
3-2 to reaffirm the rolling back of net neutrality regulations.
February 8, 2021 - The U.S. Justice Department dropped its legal challenge to California's net neutrality statute.
Violations
Many broadband operators imposed various contractual limits on the activities of their subscribers. In the best known examples, Cox Cable disciplined users of virtual private networks (VPNs) and AT&T, as a cable operator, warned customers that using a Wi-Fi service for home networking constituted "theft of service" and a federal crime.
Comcast blocked ports of VPNs, forcing the state of Washington, for
example, to contract with telecommunications providers to ensure that
its employees had access to unimpeded broadband for remote work.
Other broadband providers proposed to start charging service and
content providers in return for higher levels of service (higher network
priority, faster or more predictable), creating what is known as a tiered Internet.
In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked
the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. The FCC issued a
Letter of Inquiry to Madison River, initiating an investigation. To
avoid litigation, Madison River agreed to make a voluntary payment of
fifteen thousand dollars and agreed to not block ports used for VoIP
applications or otherwise prevent customers from using VoIP
applications.
According to the consent decree, "The Parties agree that this Consent
Decree does not constitute either an adjudication on the merits or a
factual or legal finding regarding any compliance or noncompliance with
the requirements of the Act and the Commission’s orders and rules. The
Parties agree that this Consent Decree is for settlement purposes only."
In September 2012, a group of public interest organizations such as Free Press, Public Knowledge and the New America Foundation's
Open Technology Institute filed a complaint with the FCC that AT&T
was violating net neutrality rules by restricting use of Apple's video-conferencing application FaceTime
on cellular networks to those who have a shared data plan on AT&T,
excluding those with older, unlimited or tiered data plans.
The FCC response noted that "Although this report does not attempt to
engage in any legal interpretations of the Open Internet Order, we do
note that the Order treats these mobile broadband networks differently
from traditional fixed networks. While both fixed and mobile broadband
providers must disclose their management practices, mobile broadband
providers have greater latitude for blocking devices and applications
(as long as they do not compete with the provider's own voice or video
telephony services) and discriminating in how they serve traffic, in
accordance with reasonable network-management practices."
Arguments associated with net neutrality regulations came into
prominence in mid-2002 with nine different bills introduced on this
issue between 2006 and 2013. Industry officials say that these proposals
would launch new rules and regulations for internet providers.
On October 22, 2009, Sen. McCain (R-AZ) introduced the “Internet Freedom Act of 2009”
(S. 1836). The bill would prohibit the FCC from enacting rules that
would regulate the Internet. In other words, the bill, if passed, would
prevent the FCC from imposing network or “net” neutrality rules to the
Internet. Specifically, the bill language states, “The FCC shall not
propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or
IP-enabled services. In other words, the bill, if passed, would prohibit
the FCC from enacting rules that would regulate the Internet – or
against net neutrality.
On January 5, 2011, two anti-net neutrality bills were introduced. The first bill was H.R. 96, The Internet Freedom Act,
introduced by Rep. Blackburn (R-TN), with more than sixty cosponsors
(all of whom are Republican). H.R. 96 strikes down the FCC’s December 21
passage of its rule and order on net neutrality by asserting that
regulation of the Internet is under the jurisdiction of Congress, not
the FCC.
The second bill, H.R. 166, The Internet Investment, Innovation, and Competition Preservation Act
– was introduced by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) and co-sponsored by Rep.
Blackburn. The bill also seeks to prohibit the FCC from regulating the
Internet or information services (i.e. imposing net neutrality rules)
unless there is demonstrated market failure.
On January 25, 2011, The pro-net neutrality bill – S. 74, The
Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act of
2011 –
was introduced by Sen. Cantwell (D-WA) and co-sponsored by Sen. Franken
(D-MN). The bill would codify the FCC's six net neutrality principles
(which the ALA supported), outlined in a November 2009 FCC Notice of
Proposed Rule Making (NPRM), among other things.
Positions
There has been extensive debate about whether net neutrality should be required by law
in the United States. Debate over the issue predates the coining of the
term. Advocates of net neutrality have raised concerns about the
ability of broadband providers to use their last mile
infrastructure to block Internet applications and content (e.g.
websites, services, and protocols), and even to block out competitors.
While opponents claim net neutrality regulations would deter investment
into improving broadband infrastructure and try to fix something that
isn't broken.
Prominent supporters of net neutrality include Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol; Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; law professor Tim Wu; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; Tumblr founder David Karp; Free Press President Craig Aaron; and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver, who presented two full-length Last Week Tonight segments about the issue.
Other organizations that have voiced support for Net Neutrality are
Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
In December 2017 public opinion poll, 83% of voters supported keeping
the rules on net neutrality, including 75% of Republican voters, 89% of
Democratic voters, and 86% of independent voters.
Outside of the US, several countries have removed net neutrality
protocols and have started double charging for delivering content (once
to consumer and again to content providers). This equates to a toll
being required for certain internet access, essentially limiting what is
available to all people, in particular low income households.
Large, already well-established companies may not be harmed by
cost increase that providers such as Comcast may levy upon them, but it
may stifle small businesses and start-ups. Sites such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon may not have been able to thrive absent net neutrality.
Barbara Stripling, the president of the American Library
Association states: "School, public and college libraries rely upon the
public availability of open, affordable Internet access for school
homework assignments, distance learning classes, e-government services,
licensed databases, job-training videos, medical and scientific
research, and many other essential services, we must ensure the same
quality access to online educational content as to entertainment and
other commercial offerings."
Previously existing FCC rules do not prevent telecommunications
companies from charging fees to certain content providers in exchange
for preferential treatment (the so-called "fast lanes"). Neutrality
advocates Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig have argued that the FCC does have regulatory power over the matter, following from the must-carry precedent set in the Supreme Court case Turner Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission.
Net neutrality proponents argue that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise noncompetitive services.
Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important for the
preservation of current internet freedoms; a lack of net neutrality
would allow Internet service providers, such as Comcast, to extract payment from content providers like Netflix, and these charges would ultimately be passed on to consumers.
Civil rights organizations, such as the Color of Change, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and more
argue that net neutrality is also important for communities of color
because it allows for them to tell their own stories and “organize for
racial and social justice." Much of the mainstream media does not showcase these minority people,
so these organizations believe that it is important to open the Internet
into giving these people some sort of broadcast station. By doing so,
their voices can be heard, because beforehand ISPs could “block
unpopular speech and prevent dissident voices from speaking freely
online."
In May 2014, some websites admitted to inserting code that slowed
user access to their site from known FCC IP addresses, as a protest on
the FCC's position on net neutrality.
On his show Last Week Tonight, Oliver took on the issue of net neutrality for the first time in 2014, in the show's first season. The episode went viral with 13 million views on YouTube and prompted 45,000 comments on the FCC website. At the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show,
former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler cited Oliver's episode as a turning
point in the issue of net neutrality. “John Oliver took the ultimate
arcane issue, Title II, and made it something that got people
interested. And that’s good.” Oliver returned to the issue of net neutrality on his May 7, 2017, episode
in response to Chairman Pai's promise to get rid of the regulation. He
prompted viewers to once again comment on the FCC website by buying the
domain gofccyourself.com, which garnered 1.6 million contributions.
Some have referenced the advance of Elon Musk's Starlink
as something that could undercut the lobbying power of cable companies
by offering internet access via satellite as opposed to traditional
wired or wireless technologies.
Some rural areas would have much less or no connectivity without
net neutrality, making the use of farm software impracticable or
impossible.
Organizations and companies that oppose net neutrality
regulations include several major technology hardware companies, cable
and telecommunications companies, hundreds of small internet service
providers, various think tanks, several civil rights groups, and others.
Companies such as Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast are some of the
biggest opponents to net neutrality. In fact, since 2005 these companies
have lobbied three times as much in opposition to net neutrality as the
likes of Google and Microsoft have lobbied for it.
The statistics show that from 2005 to 2013, anti-neutrality companies
filed 427 reports to lobby against net-neutrality, compared to just 176
reports filed by those for it.
Opponents argue that net neutrality would benefit industry lobbyists, and not consumers due to the potential of regulatory capture with policies that protect incumbent interests. Former hedge fund manager turned journalist Andy Kessler has argued, the threat of eminent domain
against the telecommunication providers, instead of new legislation, is
the best approach by forcing competition and better services.
One print ad frames the Hands Off the Internet message in pro-consumer
terms. "Net neutrality means consumers will be stuck paying more for
their Internet access to cover the big online companies' share," the ad
claims.
In November 2005, Edward Whitacre Jr., then chief executive officer of SBC Communications, stated "there's going to have to be some mechanism for these [Internet upstarts]
who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using", and that
"The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable
companies have made an investment,"
sparking a furious debate. SBC spokesman Michael Balmoris said that
Whitacre was misinterpreted and his comments only referred to new tiered
services. Net neutrality laws are generally opposed by the cable television and telephone industries.
Net neutrality opponents such as IBM, Intel, Juniper, Qualcomm, and Cisco
claim that net neutrality would deter investment into broadband
infrastructure, saying that "shifting to Title II means that instead of
billions of broadband investment driving other sectors of the economy
forward, any reduction in this spending will stifle growth across the
entire economy. Title II is going to lead to a slowdown, if not a hold,
in broadband build out, because if you don’t know that you can recover
on your investment, you won’t make it." Others argue that the regulation is "a solution that won’t work to a problem that simply doesn’t exist".
Critics of net neutrality argue that data discrimination is desirable for reasons like guaranteeing quality of service. Bob Kahn,
co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, called the term net neutrality a
slogan and opposes establishing it, but he admits that he is against the
fragmentation of the net whenever this becomes excluding to other
participants.
Vint Cerf, Kahn's co-founder of the Internet Protocol, explains the
confusion over their positions on net neutrality, "There’s also some
argument that says, well you have to treat every packet the same. That’s
not what any of us said. Or you can’t charge more for more usage. We
didn’t say that either."
Alternative FCC proposals
An alternate position was proposed in 2010 by then-FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski, which would narrowly reclassify Internet access as a telecommunication service under Title Two of the Communications Act of 1934. It would apply only six common carrier rules under the legal principle of forbearance
that would sufficiently prevent unreasonable discrimination and mandate
reasonable net neutrality policies under the concept of common carriage.
Incumbent ISP AT&T opposed the idea, saying that common carrier
regulations would "cram today's broadband Internet access providers into
an ill-fitting 20th century regulatory silo," while Google supported
the FCC proposal: "In particular, the Third Way will promote legal
certainty and regulatory predictability to spur investment, ensure that
the Commission can fulfill the tremendous promise of the National
Broadband Plan, and make it possible for the Commission to protect and
serve all broadband users, including through meaningful enforcement."
In October 2014, after the initial proposal was shot down, the
FCC began drafting a new proposal that would take a hybrid regulatory
approach to the issue. Although this alternative has not yet been
circulated, it is said to propose that there be a divide between
"wholesale" and "retail" transactions.
In order to illustrate clear rules that are grounded by law,
reclassification of Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 will be
involved as well as parts of Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act
of 1996. Data being sent between content provider and ISPs will involve
stricter regulations compared to transactions between ISP's and
consumers, which will involve more lax parameters. Restrictions on
offering a data fast lane will be enforced between content providers and
ISPs to avoid unfair advantages. This hybrid proposal has become the
most popular solution among the three options that FCC has reported.
However, ISPs, such as AT&T who has already warned the public via tweet "any use of Title II would be problematic", are expected to dispute this solution. The official proposal was rumored to become public by the end of 2014.
Opinions cautioning against legislation
In 2006 Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, said "I most definitely do not want the Internet to become like television where there's actual censorship... however it is very difficult
to actually create network neutrality laws which don't result in an
absurdity, like making it so that ISPs can't drop spam or stop...
attacks."
In June 2007, the US Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) urged restraint with respect to new regulations proposed by net
neutrality advocates, noting the "broadband industry is a relatively
young and evolving one," and given no "significant market failure or
demonstrated consumer harm from conduct by broadband providers" such
regulations "may well have adverse effects on consumer welfare, despite
the good intentions of their proponents." The FTC conclusions were questioned in Congress in September 2007, when Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate interstate commerce, trade and tourism subcommittee, told FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras that he feared new services as groundbreaking as Google could not get started in a system with price discrimination.
In 2011 Aparna Watal, a legal officer at an Internet company
named Atomic Labs, has put forward three points for resisting any urge
"to react legislatively to the apparent regulatory crisis".
Firstly, "contrary to the general opinion, the Comcast decision does
not uproot the Commission's authority to regulate ISPs. Section 201(b)
of the Act, which was cited as an argument by the Commission but not
addressed by the Court on procedural grounds, could grant the Commission
authority to regulate broadband Internet services where they render
"charges, practices and regulations for, and in connection with" common
carrier services unjust and unreasonable." Secondly, she suggests, it is "undesirable and premature
to legislatively mandate network neutrality or for the Commission to
adopt a paternalistic approach on the issue ... [as] there have been few
overt incidents to date, and the costs of those incidents to consumers
have been limited." She cites "prompt media attention and public backlash"
as effective policing tools to prevent ISPs from throttling traffic.
She suggests that it "would be more prudent to consider introducing
modest consumer protection
rules, such as requiring ISPs to disclose their network management
practices and to allow for consumers to switch ISPs inexpensively,
rather than introducing network neutrality laws."
"While by regulating broadband services the commission is not directly
regulating content and applications on the Internet", content will be
affected by the reclassification. "The different layers of the Internet
work in tandem with each other such that there is no possibility of
throttling or improving one layer's performance without impacting the
other layers. ... To let the Commission regulate broadband pipelines
connecting to the Internet and disregard that it indirectly involves
regulating the data that runs through them will lead to a complex, overlapping, and fractured regulatory landscape in the years to come."
Unresolved issues
As
of 2006 the debate over "neutrality" did not yet capture some
dimensions of the topic; for example, whether voice packets should get
higher priority than packets carrying email or whether emergency
services, mission-critical, or life-saving applications, such as
tele-medicine, should get priority over spam.
Alternatives to cable and DSL
Cable
companies have lobbied Congress for a federal preemption to ban states
and municipalities from competing and thereby interfering with
interstate commerce. However, there is current Supreme Court precedent
for an exception to the Commerce Power of Congress for states as states going into business for their citizens.
EPB, the municipal utility serving Chattanooga, Tennessee, petitioned the FCC to allow them to deliver internet to communities outside of the 600-square mile area that they service. A similar petition was made by Wilson, North Carolina.
According to FCC officials, some residents who lived just outside the
service areas of the Chattanooga and Wilson utilities then had no
broadband service available.
One of the two February 26, 2015, rulings set aside those states'
restrictions on municipal broadband, although legal challenges to the
FCC's authority to do so were seen as likely.
State-level actions
Individual
states have taken action to generally uphold net neutrality either
through proposed legislation or through by requiring state agencies to
establish contracts with Internet providers that offer net
neutral-services. The status as of February 26, 2018, of executive
orders and pending action at state levels is summarized as follows:
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