As I stated in my 2014 comments on FCC Proceeding 14-28, it is vitally important for internet service providers to be held to a common standard of service that applies to all websites and resources that their customers access. The best way to do that is by applying common carrier rules that dictate that traffic be handled in an equitable fashion regardless of who is sending and receiving the traffic, while maintaining some flexibility for the shaping of overall network traffic by allowing different protocols to be handled differently (such as prioritizing telesurgery protocols and other protocols highly sensitive to packet loss and/or latency).

The rules currently in place (as of early 2017) do an acceptable job of this. While there may be parts of Title II classification that are designed for older services and technologies, it is the best fit we have until such time as Congress sees fit to update the law with better classifications, rules, and provisions that more closely reflect the services and technologies that we have today. (The current mechanism of forbearance is imperfect, but understandable; it is more important to have workable rules that protect consumers and ensure that businesses play fairly both with consumers and with each other than to go without those rules for the sake of having fewer words for lawyers to read through.)

Internet service as an information service made sense in the world of the 1990's, where the most prominent model of internet access was America Online, which very much promoted itself as a one-stop portal to news, entertainment, and email. They were still pushing this model in the mid-2000s, when briefly I found myself using AOL because I could not get better internet access. (The place where I lived then should have been covered by one of two Cable ISPs; each said that they didn't serve our street.  The house across the road had access, but we couldn't even get anyone to come out and look.)  I did not use their email or portal then, and I do not use anything similar now. I do not know anyone personally who uses anything like that now.  My ISP offers me an email address that I do not use, except as an interesting gauge for how much spam it collects. (I use a separate email service instead.) I don't think they offer other services targeted specifically for the web, and even if they did, I would likely choose to use services from someone else instead. The only time I log into my account on my ISP's website is when I go to pay my bill.

The idea that Internet service is not a telecommunications service because users of that service do not typically control the routing or domain name resolution, but that instead these services qualify internet service as an information service (as proposed in Paragraph 29 of FCC-17-60), does not, in fact, make sense.  I do not control the routing for the phone calls that I place -- that is typically handled by computer systems nowadays, much like internet traffic. I don't know what exchanges or trunks that call may pass through.  I may not even know whether a number that I am dialing reaches a physical landline, a cellular phone, or a VoIP phone. But the fact that my phone service makes this connection does not change the fact that it is a telecommunications service rather than an information service. Even the fact that my phone company offers 411 does not change the fact that their telecommunications service is treated, and should be treated, as a telecommunications service.

(If the FCC is specifically proposing that using my ISP's DNS servers makes my internet service an information service, then I would be happy to switch to using DNS servers from another provider, and to help my friends and family do the same. The only reason I do not do so now is because it is simply convenient to use my ISP's DNS -- it is not, however, particularly *inconvenient* to switch.)

I do not expect my ISP to offer a curated portal to the internet. However, my ISP, as many others, also provides a variety of other services, which I choose not to use. My current ISP is also a cable provider, and as such, offers the opportunity for me to subscribe to music and video channels. ISPs I have had, have, over the years, also had partnerships with various content providers and other organizations, which they have promoted.  This is fine and good. However, it means that they may have a conflict of interest when supplying me with internet service to access my subscriptions to competitors' services. While I would hope that they would not abuse their position to interfere with their customers' access to competing services, it makes sense to have some basic regulations to let them know that it is not okay to do so. For example, I do not wish for my ISP to block or slow down access to any of the websites I visit, but particularly to those offering services that compete with their or their partners' interests. I should be able to visit forums where people discuss the behavior of their ISPs even if they discuss my ISP unfavorably, I should be able to look up competing ISP's rates, I should be able to access online music and video services, all without any particular interference from my ISP based on which sites, pages, and resources I am connecting to.

Paid prioritization is not okay. I pay my ISP for access to the internet. The various service providers I visit on the internet pay their ISPs to let me access their content on the internet. My content provider should not also have to pay extra money to every single internet service provider for every one of their customers to carry their traffic; such a scenario would severely hamper the operability of the internet, and would also hamper the ability of new content providers to start up and become established. Netflix can possibly afford to weather such a scenario, but a smaller streaming service that specializes in a specific audience, like fans of old movies or animation, might not. Additionally, because slowdowns due to paid prioritization would generally not be transparent to the customer, a patron of an affected service would likely blame the service first rather than the ISP. (They might, for example, decide, "Oh, this service is always slow and buffering. Is it really worth it for me to pay for this every month? I guess I can just go with what they offer on [ISP's chosen content portal]", without necessarily realizing that it is the ISP slowing down their traffic to that service in the first place.)

I should not, as a consumer, have to make my decisions about which ISP to use based on what paid partnerships they have in place, particularly as those are frequently subject to change. I am lucky enough at the moment to have a choice about which broadband ISP to use. Even then, it's not much of a choice -- I left my last ISP because when my previous ISP sold my service contract to them, they suddenly dropped my service and were unable to reconnect me to the internet for more than a month.  (Everything worked up to the day of the switchover, after which my phone service worked, and my internet service did not.) I called customer service three times in the span of two weeks, and was on the phone for about an hour each time. After that, I made arrangements with my current ISP -- the only other broadband option in my area -- to set up service.  They have been decent since I have been with them, which was a pleasant relief -- the reason I had been reluctant to go with this company in the first place was because I had seen family and friends receive horrible customer and technical service from them (referred to in my comments on FCC Proceeding 14-28).  You couldn't pay me to go back to the other ISP, which couldn't even provide service that had been working just fine for two years before they took over.  (The other ISP eventually *offered* to pay me to come back. I calculated what it would cost me to switch -- including time off work to wait for installation -- and, more importantly, what it would cost me to switch back again if they proved to be just as incompetent as before -- and laughed, as it didn't come close to covering any of it.)

Since my two broadband options (more than I have had anywhere else!) are currently between service that works, and service that doesn't work, I don't see myself as having a great deal of choice or flexibility when it comes to choosing an ISP. And yet having internet access is important to me. Not having internet access at home is a major inconvenience, and when I consider internet service among my bills, I classify it as a utility. 

I recognize that the Title II classification does not necessarily make a perfect fit, and requires what feel like kludges (like the current policy of forbearance) to make it work.  As I said in 2014, I still believe that "we should stop trying to shoehorn something as important as the internet into rules that were designed for other, older and quite different services and technologies, and create a new classification…", but, again, as in 2014, I still believe that it is absolutely vital that any consideration of how we should regulate the internet, "… acknowledges the need for a certain amount of freedom for innovation while also acknowledging that for the internet to work properly for everyone, in order for content providers to compete fairly, and in order for an open internet to thrive, an ISP must not block or slow the delivery of packets based on their content or source."

Thank you for your time.
Signed,
Emily Johnson