The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities

Russell A. Newman, Sandra Braman

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780262355087
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Media reform activists rejoiced in 2015 when the FCC codified network neutrality, approving a set of Open Internet rules that prohibitedproviders from favoring some content and applications over others—only to have their hopes dashed two years later when the agency reversed itself. In this book, Russell Newman offers a unique perspective on these events, arguing that the movement for network neutrality was of a piece with its neoliberal environment rather than counter to it; perversely, it served to solidify the continued existence of a commercially dominant internet and even emergent modes of surveillance and platform capitalism. Going beyond the usual policy narrative of open versus closed networks, or public interest versus corporate power, Newman uses network neutrality as a lens through which to examine the ways that neoliberalism renews and reconstitutes itself, the limits of particular forms of activism, and the shaping of future regulatory processes and policies.

Newman explores the debate's roots in the 1990s movement for open access, the transition to network neutrality battles in the 2000s, and the terms in which these battles were fought. By 2017, the debate had become unmoored from its own origins, and an emerging struggle against "neoliberal sincerity" points to a need to rethink activism surrounding media policy reform itself.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Network Neutrality, Media Reform, and Neoliberalism
• 1. Knowledge and the Neoliberal Thought Collective: Viewing Network Neutrality through the Appropriate Lens
• 2. Open Access: Nascent Moves to Counter Cable Giant Power in the Late 1990s
• 3. Knowing the Net, 1: At a Relative Apex
• 4. Knowing the Net, 2: The FCC Decides in Cable’s Favor
• 5. Erasures and Emergences: Net Neutrality’s Ambivalent Emergence
• 6. Advocates, Regulators, and the Ersatz: Defeat Snatched from the Jaws of Victory
• 7. The Shifting Political Economics of Net Neutrality: A Continuum, Not a Break
• 8. Knowledge, Access, and the Currents Flowing Beneath
• 9. Net Neutrality as Wrecking Ball
• Conclusion
• References
• Index