Big Tech Tries to Have its First Amendment Cake and Eat It Too

 

While my headline lacks something in concision, the topic for today is anything but simple:  whether internet-based enterprises such as Amazon, Google, Tiktok, and X are free to do basically anything they want with the input their users provide, or whether the states of Texas and Florida can impose certain restrictions on content moderation.  Last week the U. S. Supreme Court heard opening oral arguments in two related cases on this topic that the Court has decided to hear together.

 

NetChoice v. Paxton pits the trade association NetChoice, which includes such heavy hitters as Amazon, Google, and X, against the Texas state gadfly and attorney general Ken Paxton, who attempted to enforce a bill that would prohibit social media companies from censoring posts except in extreme cases such as obscenity and libel.  Moody v. NetChoice concerns a law that was passed in Florida at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis to prevent social media firms from "de-platforming" a political candidate actively running for office.  The lawsuits arising from NetChoice's objections to what it sees as restrictions on its members' First Amendments freedom of speech have percolated through the federal courts and ended up at the Supreme Court last Monday.

 

There are two extreme positions that mark the boundaries of this debate.  One extreme is taken by the state legislatures, which is that large internet-based firms, including but not limited to social-media outfits such as X and TikTok, are used so universally that they should be considered as "common carriers."  A common carrier, in legal parlance, is a service that is so essential to modern life that it must accept customers and their activities on a basis limited only by common-sense rules.  The classic common carrier was the old Ma Bell system back when all you could do with a phone was call Aunt Maude.  As long as you paid your monthly bill, you could say absolutely anything you wanted to say, and Ma Bell wouldn't stop you.  And anybody who can muster up the cash for a bus ticket can ride the bus.  Similarly, the state bills object to censorship, de-platforming, and other ways that social media companies either emphasize or obscure certain users depending on what they are saying, because the state laws tend to view them as common carriers.

 

The other extreme is taken by NetChoice, which views its members as valiant warriors protecting their own freedom of speech as well as that of their users.  Their classic analogy is the old-fashioned hot-type newspaper, back when all you could do with the paper was line the bottom of the birdcage—after reading it, of course.  Nobody presumed to tell the editorial-page editor what letters he could or could not include in the paper, and so no state law should tell X which tweets to suppress or encourage, or leave alone.  They are private firms and it's their business what they do with their content, not the states' business. 

 

A report on the first day's arguments by the Electronic Privacy Informatiion Center (EPIC) indicates that the Supreme Court justices are not enthusiastic about either end of this spectrum.  In particular, they seem to think that NetChoice is being more than a little hypocritical because of how it has used a law called Section 230.

 

Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act gives NetChoice members immunity from prosecution for libel for what any of their users say, in this sentence:  "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."  The word "publisher" echoes our exemplary newspaper editor, and Section 230 lets X say, in effect, "Man, we didn't write or publish or say that.  Our crazy user said that, and you can't blame us for what he said."  Section 230 protection is one of the carefully guarded legal jewels of the NetChoice empire, and flocks of lawyers appear whenever anyone threatens it.

 

At least two Supreme Court justices perceived that NetChoice is trying to have its free-speech cake by defeating the state laws limiting their content-moderation actions, and eat it too by claiming innocence when someone posts something objectionable and a NetChoice member claims immunity under Section 230.  At one point, Justice Gorsuch asked, "So it's speech for the purposes of the First Amendment, your speech, your editorial control, but when we get to Section 230, your submission is that that isn't your speech?"  And at another point, Justice Alito said, "It's your message when you want to escape state regulation, but it's not your message when you want to escape liability under state tort law." 

 

It's anybody's guess what the Court will decide in these cases, but indications are that neither NetChoice nor the states will get everything they want.  My own view is that social-media firms, by catering to the lower instincts of the human mind and heart, have wrought incalculable damage to the political and social structures of not only the U. S. but many other countries as well.  And especially when the government begins to "assist" social-media firms in deciding what is free speech and should be left alone or promoted, and what is "disinformation" and should be de-emphasized or suppressed, we have traveled a good part of the way down a slippery slope to something akin to the old Soviet Union, or the present Peoples' Republic of China, where everything you say and do is monitored and assessed and has consequences that can be quite dire if you go against what the government wants you to do. 

 

The Texas and Florida laws are a first step toward opposing this trend, and NetChoice's actions opposing them is exactly what you would expect a bully to do if someone challenges his dominance.  Fortunately, the federal structure of our government is still functioning, although seriously damaged, and I hope that the justices' decisions in these cases will clip the wings of an industry which, Icarus-like, is flying way too close to the sun.

 

Sources:  I referred to an editorial by Jennifer Huddleston in the Mar. 1, 2024 edition of the Austin American-Statesman, a blog post on the EPIC website at https://epic.org/four-key-takeaways-from-the-netchoice-v-moody-and-paxton-oral-arguments/, and the Wikipedia articles on NetChoice and Section 230.

Carr's Fix for Social Media: The Digital Communication Act

 

Nicholas Carr is a writer whose book The Shallows:  What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, published in 2010, gained considerable attention by pointing out how new technologies have affected our basic thought processes, and not always in a good way.  In the fall 2021 issue of The New Atlantis journal, he proposes a legislative initiative he calls the Digital Communications Act that would, if adopted, go far toward alleviating some of the worst harms that social media currently cause.  But to understand the thrust of his proposals, a little historical background is in order.

 

Electronic media basically do two different kinds of things:  personal communication and broadcasting.  Until the Internet came along, these two different activities were done by more or less completely different kinds of technology.  The telegraph and telephone are classic examples of the first kind:  personal communication, one person to another.  As regulations evolved in the twentieth century to deal with issues of privacy arising from the fact that telegraph and telephone operators could eavesdrop on personal communications through their systems, legislatures and courts came up with what is called a "common-carrier" doctrine. 

 

Borrowed from the transportation field, the concept of a common carrier is that some industries do things that are so vital to the public good that they need to be regulated in order to enforce goods such as fairness and privacy.  The first quasi-independent federal agency of any magnitude, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was established to enforce common-carrier rules on railroads, which had previously engaged in discriminatory and predatory pricing to exploit farmers who had no other way to sell their crops in wider markets than local ones. 

 

When Western Union and the Bell System came along, the federal government applied common-carrier rules to them.  The tariffs, as they were called, could get quite complicated, but the overarching principle was simple:  treat all communications as private and treat all (or most) customers the same. 

 

Broadcasting, on the other hand, had to be treated differently once people figured out that one person in a studio could potentially talk to millions of others nationwide.  The Federal Radio Commission of 1927, predecessor to the current Federal Communications Commission (FCC), came up with a phrase that described how broadcasters must treat the privilege, granted by an FCC license, of addressing thousands or millions at once:  "the public interest, convenience, or necessity," sometimes abbreviated PICON.  Over the decades, PICON has dictated how broadcasters must behave in order to retain their broadcasting privileges.  As the nature of the public changes continually, PICON standards change as well.  From the 1940s through the 1980s, the FCC imposed what was called the "fairness doctrine," which required broadcasters to give equal time to opposing sides in a political contest, for example.  After the FCC abandoned the doctrine in 1987, religious and partisan political broadcasting flourished, but the net benefit to the public is debatable, to say the least.

 

When the Internet came along, it put all these nice separate types of communication in a super-speed blender and mixed them all together.  From the same computer, I can email one friend, or if I'm a super-influencer, I can send the same image of my latest clothing style to ten million people.  But the two categories—personal communication and broadcasting—still apply, and it's not that hard to separate them by either intent or by statistical means.  As Carr puts it, "An Instagrammer [or an engineering ethics blogger] with a hundred followers can be assumed to be engaged in conversation;  an Instagrammer with a hundred thousand followers is a broadcaster."  Carr says—and I agree with him—that the psychological or humanistic categories of personal communication and broadcasting are still useful, and should be used to discriminate between two types of regulation that his proposed Digital Communications Act would apply to social media and internet service providers.

 

For personal communications, ranging from emails, to Facebook posts to a few friends, to search-engine inquiries, the Act would require companies to respect one's privacy.  No more searching for snow shovels online and getting buried in emails and pop-ups for snow shovels, dirt shovels, and snow cones.  No more talking about driving to a fast-food outlet and having your phone overhear your conversation and throw ads at you for that chain, or a rival one.  We've almost gotten used to it, but I know people who have gotten used to living with cancer.  That doesn't mean it's a good thing to have cancer.

 

For broadcasting, which means anything anybody does that reaches more than a certain threshold number of people, something like the old PICON doctrine needs to be imposed.  Carr is perhaps intentionally vague on what a 2021-era version of the fairness doctrine would look like.  Much of the really harmful stuff that runs around the Internet is spontaneous, as "going viral" is not something one particular person can infallibly bring about.  But the process itself is easily monitored and encouraged by the social media companies, as things like that are their bread and butter.  And it wouldn't be hard to set up rules or software to regulate the process—technically, I mean.

 

Politically, it's another can of worms altogether.  In what could qualify as the understatement of the year, Carr says his proposed Act "would be complicated and controversial.  It would be resisted by many powerful private interests."  Yes, only Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, well, you know the list.  It would be opposed mainly because it would cut off one of their main revenue streams, which is advertising targeted by means of snooping into your private communications, and that would be barred under the Act.  A snowball has an excellent chance inside Mt. Vesuvius compared to this bill, at least under present circumstances. 

 

But times and circumstances change, and maybe some day an outrage may occur that is so universally deplored that the political will of the country will favor such a move.  As Carr points out, it was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 that catalyzed international regulation of the radio waves, because interfering stations made it hard to conduct rescue operations by radio.  We have had numerous political disasters that social media have played a part in, but nobody has been killed yet, at least not directly. 

 

Anyway, I think Carr has done us all a great service in basing his argument for a Digital Communications Act on a sound historical footing, and now all we need to do is enact it.  Stay tuned, so to speak.

 

Sources:  Nicholas Carr's article "How to Fix Social Media" appeared on pp. 3-20 of the Fall 2021 issue of The New Atlantis.  I also referred to a Wikipedia article on the fairness doctrine. 

Censoring the Censors? Florida's Anti-Censorship Law

 

On May 24, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill designed to stop social media firms from censoring free speech.  At least that's what the governor's website claims it does.  Two big-tech industry groups, Netchoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), sued the state of Florida in early June over the legislation, which is scheduled to take effect on July 1.  What exactly does the law do, and why are organizations such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google sponsoring a lawsuit to halt it?

 

People of certain political persuasions need not look far for motivations to pass such a law.  Following the assault on the U. S. Capitol on Jan. 6 of this year, the alternative social networking service Parler, which attracted users that had been suspended from mainstream media such as Twitter, found itself without Amazon's hosting service and cut off from Apple's and Google's facilities as well.  And former president Donald Trump is still banned from mainstream social media.  These are just the tips of an iceberg of censorship that some people view as politically motivated.

 

The bill signed by Gov. DeSantis would provide for fines of up to $250,000 for "willfully deplatforming" political candidates, and also allows private citizens to sue firms committing such indiscretions as well.  Social media firms cannot de-platform any statewide or local political candidate, or else they face penalties of up to $250,000 a day. 

 

The Netchoice-CCIA suit alleges that this law constitutes a "smorgasbord of constitutional violations," according to an article in National Review.  If allowed to take effect, the suit says it will impede the social media firms' ability to "protect their services, users, advertisers, and the public at large from a variety of harmful, offensive, or unlawful material." 

 

Just to take a hypothetical extreme case, you have to admit that the CCIA suit has a point.  Suppose for the sake of argument that a Florida candidate for statewide office chose to post some child pornography in a political blog on Facebook.  Leaving aside the bad judgment on the part of the candidate, Facebook would be caught between a rock and a hard place.  If they deplatform the candidate, they would face fines from the State of Florida.  But if they leave the post alone, they will be an accomplice to numerous other violations of federal and state laws. 

 

On the other hand, the law is part of a growing trend for legislatures and governments in general to put the screws to Big Tech in various ways.  Now that social media carry the bulk of public discourse (as opposed to the legacy media of radio, television, and newspapers), they find themselves walking a fine line between suppression of free speech and toleration of harmful content.

 

The Florida law is only the latest in the history of attempts on the part of states to suppress or control mass media.  Lousiana saw a more blatant effort when Huey Long, who formally left the governor's office in 1932 to be a U. S. senator but effectively kept running the state anyway, passed a steep tax on large-circulation Lousiana newspapers, calling it a "tax on lying."  In the present case, ironically, Florida is not penalizing the media for what they're saying, but for what they're not saying, or rather for what they're not allowing certain parties to do or say on their platforms. 

 

This issue can be viewed as a contest between rival goods:  the good of free speech for political discourse and democratic government, and the good of avoiding what, in the phrases of the CCIA suit, is "harmful, offensive, or unlawful."  And the unfortunate thing is that the parties to the conflict have little or no agreement as to exactly what these rival goods are.

 

Take the concept of free speech.  Back at a time, say sixty or eighty years ago, when there was a general public consensus that airing political views of almost any stripe, from theocratic conservatism to anarchic Communism, was to be tolerated for the good of the republic, there was also a general public consensus that hard-core pornography should be banned from publicly accessible media, including the U. S. Postal Service.  Gradually, however, the concept of free speech was expanded to encompass what earlier generations would regard as pornography, and today there is a multibillion-dollar worldwide online trade in porn, which not only effectively enslaves thousands who are involved in producing it but corrupts those who watch it.

 

Unfortunately, there is today no general consensus on what sort of content is harmful, offensive, or even unlawful.  If everything I think is harmful or offensive was banned from the Internet, the Internet would be a much smaller enterprise.  Yet when social-media companies hire hundreds of young people and give them whatever training they receive to identify undesirable content that violates the firm's "standards," and remove the content if necessary, they  exercise personal judgment which inevitably turns out to be inconsistent, intermittent, and subjective. 

 

Of course, important decisions such as banning Donald Trump are undertaken with the knowledge and approval of the firm's leadership, but my point is that the diffuse and multifaceted nature of social media means that whatever restrictions they try to apply will also be diffuse, multifaceted, and guaranteed to make somebody unhappy.

 

I don't have a good solution to this problem.  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects social-media firms from being sued as though they themselves originated the stuff that their users post.  If we began treating social-media companies as common carriers like the telecommunications firms, and insisted that they let anybody post anything, we would need a more effective legal means to go after the individuals who would exploit this new freedom than what we now have.  But if we simply shrug our shoulders and let Mark Zuckerberg and his friends suppress anything they don't like, we have handed the keys of democracy to a bunch of billionaires, and that is likely to turn out badly too.  Stay tuned.

 

Sources:  The National Review article "Groups Representing Tech Companies Sue Florida over DeSantis Anti-Censorship Bill" appeared on June 2 at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/groups-representing-tech-companies-sue-florida-over-desantis-anti-censorship-bill/.  I referred to Gov. DeSantis's website description of the bill at https://www.flgov.com/2021/05/24/governor-ron-desantis-signs-bill-to-stop-the-censorship-of-floridians-by-big-tech/, and Elizabeth Kolbert's 2006 article on Huey Long in The New Yorker at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/06/12/the-big-sleazy, from which I took the quotation about a tax on lying.

 

Will We Miss Net Neutrality?

On Thursday, Dec. 14, the U. S. Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 in favor of repealing the Obama-era "net neutrality" rules that have been in effect since 2015.  Like so many things lately, net neutrality has become a partisan issue, and the vote went along party lines, the three Republican appointees on the Commission voting in favor of repeal and the two Democrats opposing it.  Polls show that the idea of net neutrality is popular, with as many as 80% of those asked being in favor of it.  But the pollsters generally didn't ask respondents to define net neutrality, or to say why they favored it.  Amid the protests and shrill voices raised on both sides of the issue, it's hard to get a grasp on what exactly is at stake, and what the pros and cons are.  A little history may help in this regard.

Among other things, most modern governments are expected to protect the weak against the strong.  This is an elementary aspect of justice.  In the late 1800s, during the rapid expansion of another kind of network—the railroad network—the public became aroused over perceived abuses that the railroads were practicing.  Farmers discovered that the railroads were manipulating shipping charges to curry favor with certain interest groups, and handing out free passenger passes to influential politicians.  The problems were so pervasive that the first free-standing administrative commission in the executive branch of the federal government was established to ride herd on the railroads:  the Interstate Commerce Commission, or ICC.

The ICC established rules for what became known as "common carriers"—enterprises that were so essential to the public that regulation by government was regarded as necessary.  The idea of a common carrier spread to other systems such as bus lines, airlines, and public utilities like electric and water systems.  In exchange for close regulation by the government, the business being regulated was allowed to make a reasonable profit.  Some industries eventually came around to welcoming common-carrier status, because they found that manipulating the government's rules in their favor wasn't that hard and it stabilized their business models. 

In 2003, a Columbia University professor named Tim Wu coined the phrase "net neutrality" to extend the common-carrier idea to the internet, which was not regulated in any meaningful way at the time.  In the case of the internet, the potential for the kind of abuse that the railroads got into trouble for is always there.  And there have been some incidents prior to the 2015 adoption of formal net-neutrality rules that give advocates of net neutrality some credibility.  According to the Wikipedia article on net neutrality, the internet service provider (ISP) Comcast took measures to throw digital roadblocks in the way of the troublesome service BitTorrent, which was using up a lot of bandwidth at the time, and the FCC has fined AT&T for similar misbehavior.

But the net neutrality rules that the FCC has now pledged to abandon may go too far in the other direction.  According to ISPs, the rules left them with limited flexibility for expansion and the offering of new services.  Treating everybody the same on the internet is a fine idea in principle, but working out the details can get complicated, and there are genuine judgment calls involved in an ISP's decisions of how to allocate limited fiber-optic and especially wireless bandwidth to best serve the incredible variety of customers, and websites that customers want to visit. 

We have seen how the content providers themselves (e. g. Facebook) have done things that go against some principles of net neutrality, such as the idea of no censorship.  Both for legal and moral reasons, Facebook polices itself and removes posts it deems to be unsuitable for various reasons.  But it's not an ISP that's doing this, it's Facebook. 

The ISPs, as ISPs, do not have the resources (or I suspect, the inclination) to do a lot of fine-grain discrimination, which is probably the kind of thing that many people who favor net neutrality are worried about.  Basically, the ISPs don't have time to pick through the floods of data that they must ship around every microsecond.  The most they can do in a typical situation is to note sites and services that produce unusually demanding traffic patterns.  And I think the most that they are hoping for in the repeal of net neutrality is to gain some freedom more efficiently to allocate their bandwidth in order to serve the most customers with the fewest additional resources of hardware and software. 

Maybe that is a Pollyanna-ish and naive view of ISPs, but it's hard for me to imagine that some of the more dire consequences foretold by the proponents of net neutrality will result from its abandonment:  widespread censorship, the inability of small-scale websites and enterprises to compete with larger ones based on something the ISP is doing, and so on.  One concern, transparency, is largely being taken care of by the internet itself.  Tricks like artificially degrading services are quickly detected and exposed by users, and it's easy for protesters to gather a digital lynch mob with torches and clubs and go after the bad guys.  Whether the bad guys mend their ways is another question, but my point is that if an ISP tries anything unpopular, they will be called out for it.  And this is an important self-regulating aspect of the internet that we may not appreciate as much as we should.

So my own answer is, no, I don't think we'll miss what we've had for only the last two years anyway, in terms of the Obama-era net neutrality regulations.  Even critics of the FCC decision admit that nothing is going to change right away, as the Commission has to come up with alternative rules and perhaps turn over some aspects of its work with the internet to the Federal Trade Commission. 

The internet is a modern necessity, not much less essential than electric power, and it is appropriate for governments to make sure that whoever qualifies as "weak" with regard to it is protected against unfair and unjust depredations by ISPs, or anybody else for that matter.  But even in the bad old days before government regulations were in place, abuses were fairly rare.  And it looks like the commercial instinct of self-preservation will keep ISPs from doing anything really dastardly, now that net neutrality rules are going away. 

Sources:  I referred to reports on the FCC vote to repeal net neutrality carried by AOL.com at https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/12/14/fcc-commissioner-closes-statement-on-net-neutrality-vote-with-a-warning/23307786/ and https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/12/14/federal-communications-commission-votes-to-repeal-net-neutrality-rules/23307670/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on net neutrality and the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Temperance, Net Neutrality, and the FCC

Later this week, on Feb. 26, the U. S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is going to vote on a proposal to enforce net neutrality.  Net neutrality, according to some, is the idea that all bits are created equal, and that communications firms using or operating parts of the Internet should not discriminate against or for certain types of services, providers, or customers.  If I could do one thing to help the FCC decide wisely on this proposal, I'd bring back Aristotle and ask him to explain to the commissioners what he means by egkrateia, which is usually translated as "temperance" or "moderation."  The Internet has to be one of the most influential and beneficial engineering developments of all time, and it would be a shame for the FCC to cripple it.  But if they don't exercise temperance, that's just what they might do.

Writing in the electrical engineering professional journal IEEE Spectrum, Jeff Hecht points out that wireless technologies, where a lot of the most exciting new Internet developments are happening, need careful technical management to work.  It has to do with the fact that all data on the Internet travels in little chunks called packets.  When the Internet was founded, most data was not that time-sensitive.  If data for email or a webpage shows up in pieces spaced even several seconds apart, it's no big deal.  But as highly time-sensitive services such as telecommunications (phones) and video began to switch to the Internet, and as new time-sensitive services such as multiplayer games developed, timing became a big deal.  Hecht points out that a delay of only twenty milliseconds can disrupt a phone conversation, and if a sound that short goes missing it can turn "can't" into "can" and lead to all kinds of problems.  The same goes for video, which gets jerky with such delays, or game apps, which slow down and aren't that fun anymore.

Delays like this and speed-slowing bottlenecks are especially hard to avoid in two places: (1) where internet service providers (ISPs) connect to the Internet's "backbone," or (2) where wireless is used, such as when you access the Internet from your phone or mobile device.  In the latest generation of mobile phone service, called 4G LTE, providers have developed a way to label packets with what amounts to a digital ship-by date.  Packets that spoil fast—phone conversations, video, game-player data, and time-sensitive system control data—get shipped the fastest, while packets that represent email or webpages have to wait longer in line. 

This technical packet-labeling is called "priority coding" and it's a critical ingredient in the new high-fidelity phone service called VoLTE (LTE, by the way, stands for "long-term evolution"). 

Here's where the moderation comes in.  Reportedly, the FCC is planning to reclassify the Internet as a "common carrier."  Currently the FCC views it through a different legal lens, as an "information provider," which allows the government fewer regulatory options.   But the common-carrier class includes the highly regulated telecommunications industry, and so the FCC's proposed rule changes could allow it to regulate the Internet much more closely than it does now.  Depending on what the FCC means by net neutrality, the commission (or a sneaky lawyer wielding the Commission's new rules) could use its new legal chops to break the new 4G LTE by making priority coding illegal.  After all, if every bit is created equal, shoving some to the front of the line in front of others could be viewed as discrimination.

Any time a government agency decides to extend its regulatory authority, you have to hope that it won't go overboard and stifle the industry it's allegedly trying to help.  This is where Aristotle's virtue of temperance can help.  As has happened in many other fields, the Internet's technology has in many ways outstripped the legal frameworks that were set up to regulate communications systems in the past.  I think it's good for the FCC to acknowledge that the communications world has changed, and that pretending the Internet is just an information provider is outdated.  But an attempt at heavy-handed populist-style regulation in the name of absolute net neutrality could do more harm than good.

Moderation on all sides is called for.  Free-market enthusiasts may worry that the FCC is going to tax or regulate the Internet to death with its new proposed powers.  This is unlikely.  But at the same time, a more subtle danger to watch out for is the co-opting of government authority by big corporate players in a way that favors their interests over those of small firms who want to innovate, but whose innovations pose a threat to the big guys.  This can't happen in a lightly-regulated industry, which so far the Internet has been, for the most part.  I think the FCC is smart enough not to issue rules that would flat-out break the 4G LTE technology.  But any extension of regulatory authority can lead to manipulation of that authority by vested interests.  And I think that is what Aristotle would caution us about the most.  But first, we'd have to explain to him what the Internet is.

Sources:  Jeff Hecht's article "Net Neutrality's Technical Troubles" was posted on the IEEE Spectrum website on Feb. 12, 2015 at http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/net-neutralitys-technical-troubles/.  On Feb. 4, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler declared his intentions with regard to net neutrality in the online edition of Wired at

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/fcc-chairman-wheeler-net-neutrality/.  I also referred to an article on The Daily Dot about the FCC's Title II authority (which allows it to regulate common carriers such as telecomm companies) at http://www.dailydot.com/politics/what-is-title-ii-net-neutrality-fcc/.  I most recently blogged on net neutrality on Nov. 24, 2014 in "How Neutral Is the Net?"