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Here's why that's nonsense.

The new FCC proposal retains the "transparency" tenet from the original Open Internet principles, which is fine — that's what the recent court decision allowed them to retain. So the short version, to quote Wheeler's summary, is that the FCC proposes:

That all ISPs must transparently disclose to their subscribers and users all relevant information as to the policies that govern their network;

That no legal content may be blocked; and

That ISPs may not act in a commercially unreasonable manner to harm the Internet, including favoring the traffic from an affiliated entity.

And that sounds awesome and perfectly logical and reasonable...if you live in a world in which you have a choice in ISPs. But you don't, and if the Comcast merger goes through, you're going to live in even less of one — we've gone from a world with, around 2004, thousands of little ISPs competing with one another to a world with a little handful of massive access providers who have carved up the country into territories with nearly no competition (unless you live in a big city, in which case you might be lucky enough to have two or three options).

So you get to know just how badly your provider is screwing you. And you get to decide...uh...whether or not to give your provider money in order to be on the internet.

Hooray.

...And that's not even going into a discussion about what the hell "commercially unreasonable" means, or who gets to decide what's "commercially unreasonable," or even really looking at whether or not "commercially unreasonable" means that it's perfectly fine to double-charge companies like Netflix — once for access and once for bandwidth, which means they'll have to pass the expense on to you, the consumer...twice (once for access and once for bandwidth), while your own access provider is also double-charging you as well, once for access and once for bandwidth...

...And now you know just a small part of why this is really, really troublesome.

Oh, thank you so much for the comment! Here, let me give some background, and explain why people keep talking about things like Titles and whatnot.

Without going into too much history (because there's a lot of history, and it predates the internet, and it's mostly AT&T's fault, and it's actually way more interesting than you'd think): the Telecommunications Act of 1996 governs the internet. That's a simplification, but bear with me. The Telecommunications Act is broken down into a few sections, but the important ones for our purposes are Title I and Title II. Title I regulates "information services" (like email and web pages: the stuff that runs over the tubes) and Title II regulates "telecommunications services."

But this was 1996, and nobody really knew what "the internet" was going to be, so they didn't really specify where the internet fit. So Congress decided that the FCC would get to choose depending on where technology and competition needed it to be. In 2002, the FCC decided it would go under Title I, because Title I had the least regulations and would allow the internet to grow and flourish unrestricted. This is important: Title II offered the FCC a lot more regulatory power, but the FCC chose not to use it.

Well, the free market happened, and the big players ate up all the small players pretty quickly. Soon, the FCC started proposing some guidelines for ISP conduct, and those guidelines would be the first Net Neutrality / Open Internet rules. But really, nobody followed them, because they were just guidelines, really.

So in early 2009, the FCC started to draft actual rules instead of guidelines. Around this same time, in 2009-ish, Comcast got busted throttling peer-to-peer traffic. The FCC smacked them and told them to stop. Comcast sued the FCC, and in 2010, the DC Circuit Court told the FCC, look, you can't regulate internet traffic because you classified it as an "information service," as Title I, not a "telecommunications service." You did it wrong, used the wrong magic words, and Title I doesn't give you the kind of regulatory power you need. But you totally have the power to reclassify it, and then you can regulate it all you want, because Title II does exactly what you want it to.

The FCC decided it wasn't going to do that, because it was very skittish about imposing Title II regulation on the internet (and because Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon freaked out and begged them not to, and probably even said "please" a few times). Now, I'll note: yes, Title II has some very stringent rules, but the FCC has the power of forbearance: it's allowed to choose which rules it wants to impose and which rules it doesn't. So if it reclassifies, it doesn't have to impose all the rules. Just the ones that are in the public interest. But, you know, they said "please."

So the FCC finished writing its Open Internet rules (except now everybody in the world knew that the court had already said they weren't going to work), and as soon as it did, Verizon sued. The court case dragged on for three years, because lawyers, and then in February the DC Circuit told the FCC, look, you can't regulate internet traffic because you classified it as an "information service," not a "telecommunications service." You used the wrong magic words. But you totally have the power to reclassify it, and then you can regulate it all you want, because Title II does exactly what you want it to.

And now the FCC is, again, refusing to reclassify, and instead, they're letting the service providers charge extra for access and use. This will harm small business owners, even further wreck competition and innovation, raise barriers to entry for new start-ups, and drain money from users both individual and corporate. But I bet the ISPs said "please" again.

Hi, Josh. Good to see you doing this.

This seems to be a big about-face from the FCC — I don't think anyone expected Wheeler to really push for reclassification (even though the DC Circuit has more or less urged the FCC to reclassify twice now), but whereas Genachowski at least tried to come up with a rulemaking that was deferential to service providers while maintaining the core of Open Internet principles, Wheeler seems to have just thrown the original principles out the window.

Congress has shot down legislation repeatedly, so where do we go from here? How can we continue the Open Internet push?

Flawless victory.

Thanks! I may make a blog post out of it or something.