I started writing something about funding community media houses using fees extracted from cable companies, something that local governments will have more political leverage to do with this recent FCC ruling, but as I look back at the dissenting opinions from the Republican commissioners, and the palpable fear of claiming anything close to regulation in the final FCC order, I feel pretty deflated. Don’t get me wrong, its good that net neutrality was preserved, but we should also call it what it is: holding ground. This wasn’t a step forward, it was a lot of work and campaigning just to keep a not terrible status quo.

Here’s the first two paragraphs of what I was about to write:

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Chances are you listen to a couple as well. You might also subscribe to some YouTube channels or follow a live stream account. Maybe you read a small circulation magazine. There’s certainly been a lot of ink spilled about the democratizing effects of consumer devices that afford all of this new media and there’s been an equal amount of rigorous research into what sorts of communities they engender: fan groups, social movements, and radical (left and right) political affinities just to name a few. What we don’t talk about very often are the kinds of organizations that make something like Welcome to NightVale or The Ideas Channel possible in the first place. One consequence of that is a serious lack of political imagination with regards to what we should be demanding from the governments and corporations that hold the keys to the server cabinets. There are lots of ways to take this but, in light of the recent FCC ruling on Net Neutrality lets focus on something that seems eminently possible now that wasn’t before: regional networks owned and operated by the communities they are meant to serve.

As cable companies were carving out their markets it became commonplace for local governments to start negotiating for extra goodies in exchange for a place on the telephone pole. Public access television was often the beneficiary of these deals but in the last few decades those deals have extracted fewer resources for the public and public access programming has to compete with hundreds instead of dozens of channels. Then there’s the Internet. It makes little sense to limit your media to a local TV market when you can quickly and easily post a YouTube video. Middle class people might find it easy enough to make media with the tools available but we could certainly do more to provide lending libraries for this sort of thing. It might also be nice to rent space in a real sound studio.

That all seems pretty reasonable, right? I was gonna talk about revitalizing libraries as a place to not only read but also “write” media. I had this great idea for an extended metaphor about “gaining write access” to government-funded media but then I made the mistake of looking over the dissenting opinions to find some kind of counter-intuitive, even-the-Republicans-could-agree sort of argument but the wind was out of my sails. The conversations at the highest level are so cynical that they appear as afterthoughts: like they were written long before an actual decision was even reached. For example, here’s a line from the press release describing the official order:

the Order DOES NOT require broadband providers to contribute to the Universal Service Fund under Section 254.

and yet, here is the dissenting opinion from Commissioner Pai:

One avenue for higher bills is the new taxes and fees that will be applied to broadband. Here’s the background. If you look at your phone bill, you’ll see a “Universal Service Fee,” or something like it. These fees—what most Americans would call taxes—are paid by Americans on their telephone service. They funnel about $9 billion each year through the FCC. Consumers haven’t had to pay these taxes on their broadband bills because broadband has never before been a Title II service.
But now it is. And so the Order explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes. Indeed, it repeatedly states that it is only deferring a decision on new broadband taxes—not prohibiting them.

Obviously there’s a lot of bad faith arguments happening here. Either the FCC as a whole is trying to deflect everyone’s attention from the possibilities of new taxes, or Commissioner Pai is using a tried-and-true mix of slippery slope scare tactics to make people fear the protection of existing broadband regulation. All of this misses the point that broadband should be paying into the Universal Service Fund. That was the fund that redistributed wealth from people that could afford telephones to people that could not afford telephones or lived in regions where it wasn’t profitable to run telephone lines. It was a tremendous revenue generator, modernized many regions that would have otherwise been cut off entirely, and in the long run actually forced Bell to think really long term about infrastructure. This is a good thing that one side is vilifying and the other is desperately, IN ALL CAPS trying to distance itself from.

So I’m not going to do the thing where I describe some really useful public program with the annual operating budget of a HellFire missile and watch it just sit there looking politically untenable. I’m really happy for all the people that see this as a huge win, and it is definitely a good thing that came out of tons of tireless work, but it only take a minor zooming out in scope and time to see that this is a somewhat minor victory. This is making things not actively suck worse. It is creating the potential for possibly better ways of doing things but we need to demand so much more.