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  3. Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet

Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet

Danny Kimball
Open Access Open Access
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"Net neutrality," a dry but crucial standard of openness in network access, began as a technical principle informing obscure policy debates but became the flashpoint for an all-out political battle for the future of communications and culture. Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet is a critical cultural history of net neutrality that reveals how this intentionally "boring" world of internet infrastructure and regulation hides a fascinating and pivotal sphere of power, with lessons for communication and media scholars, activists, and anyone interested in technology and politics. While previous studies and academic discussions of net neutrality have been dominated by legal, economic, and technical perspectives, Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet offers a humanities-based critical theoretical approach, telling the story of how activists and millions of everyday people, online and in the streets, were able to challenge the power of the phone and cable corporations that historically dominated communications policy-making to advance equality and justice in media and technology.
  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • List of Illustrations
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1. Democratic Communications Infrastructure, Discourse, Policy, and Advocacy
  • Chapter 2. Defining Broadband
  • Chapter 3. Clash of Titans or Best of Frenemies?
  • Chapter 4. Nuclear Net Neutrality
  • Chapter 5. The Title II Turn
  • Chapter 6. Organizing for Net Neutrality
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Screen Reader Friendly: yes

Accessibility Summary: A complex book with images, list items, and complex formatting, which are defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmarks, reading order, Structural Navigation, Index, and semantic structure.

Accessibility Conformance: The EPUB Publication meets all accessibility requirements and achieves [WCAG 2.0] Level AA conformance.

Accessibility Hazard: none

Accessibility Features: Alternative text for images, Display transformability of text, Index, Page numbers, Logical reading order, Correct use of heading levels, Table of Contents

Access Modes: textual, visual

Sufficient Access Modes: textual

See the accessibility page for more information about the accessibility of this platform and content.

Open Access publication of this work is generously supported by The Eugene B. Power Fund
Citable Link
Published: 2022
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-90245-3 (open access)
  • 978-0-472-03859-6 (paper)
Subject
  • Media Studies:New Media

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  • 20203
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Diagram depicting the pathway of data back and forth between an internet user and online content provider, through broadband providers on each end and the internet backbone in between. Also depicts payments to broadband providers from users on one end and content providers on the other.

Traditional internet access infrastructure

From Introduction

Page 7 →Fig. 1. Traditional internet access infrastructure (diagram by author).

Diagram depicting internet access infrastructure with additional payment going from the online content provider to the users’ broadband provider in addition to its own broadband provider.

Whitacre tax

From Introduction

Fig. 2. Internet access infrastructure with a “Whitacre tax” for content to reach users (diagram by author).

Diagram depicting internet access infrastructure with online content coming to the user through their broadband provider, and directly from the broadband provider, without passing through the internet backbone, with additional payments to the broadband provider from the content provider.

Private internets

From Introduction

Fig. 3. Internet access infrastructure as “private internets” (diagram by author).

Line graph with connection speed in Mbps on the vertical Y axis and months between January 2013 and April 2014 on the horizontal X axis. The connection speed remains consistent around 2–2.2 Mbps between January and October 2013, then drops down to 1.5 Mbps by January 2014. February 2014 is labelled “Netflix and Comcast agree on direct connection deal,” where the speed begins rising upward to reach 2.8 Mbps by April 2014.

Netflix-Comcast direct connection deal

From Chapter 3

Fig. 4. Average Netflix connection speeds on Comcast’s broadband network (Netflix, 2014). (Created by Statista, CC BY-ND 4.0.)

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