Category News

The Open Internet Goes to Court

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

This afternoon the New America Foundation held a panel discussing the upcoming court case that pits Verizon against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The case began back in 2010 and has moved slowly, but oral arguments are finally scheduled to begin on Monday. Verizon is challenging the FCC’s “Open Internet Order,” particularly the non-discrimination rules that are in it. Those rules prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking access to content or applications, unless they were unlawful. In laymen’s terms, Verizon and Comcast are both ISPs that compete with one another and both have incentives to prevent consumers from accessing their competitors products and related applications. The non-discrimination rules ensure that they cannot do that or restrict access to any other domain of the web.

Verizon is challenging the FCC’s authority to implement those rules, arguing that the commission is infringing on the company’s freedom of speech. Effectively, Verizon is saying that it’s ability to block applications and content is speech and is protected by the First Amendment. Not surprisingly, the FCC disagrees with Verizon’s claims, saying that the telecom network is just a carrier of speech.

The panel was moderated by Sarah Morris, the Senior Policy Counsel for the Open Technology Council at New America. After a brief introduction, Susan Crawford, the Former Special Assistant for Science Technology and Innovation Policy to President Obama and a professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, lit into Verizon’s claim, calling it an “astonishing and laughable argument.”

“The D.C. Circuit must firmly squash Verizon’s First Amendment claim that any oversight of its high-speed internet access service would be unconstitutional,” she said. “The D.C. Circuit must stop this argument in its tracks. Verizon says that in its capacity – when it’s wearing that hat as a high-speed internet provider – it is the same as the Washington Post and that any effort by government to constrain its ability to slice and dice and prioritize and make deals with content providers about that high-speed internet access should be found unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

“Verizon’s goal here is to make this sound like a serious, legitimate, constitutional argument,” she continued. “If they get there, that’s a win. If it sounds serious, that’s a win for them.”

Matt Wood, the Policy Director for Free Press, elaborated on his organization’s goal of net neutrality, meaning that ISPs treat all information on the internet equally (aka they can’t discriminate).

“Net neutrality isn’t some sort of content regulation,” he said. “It isn’t regulating the internet even though people will try that tired line on you even today. What it is is a simple statement that the person you pay to ship something can’t mess with the contents they’re carrying for you. Contrary to Verizon’s claim, ISPs can’t edit the internet. They can’t edit your email messages. They can’t tell you which websites you can go to and which ones you can’t go to.”

All the panelists supported the FCC in the case and agreed with Crawford and Wood’s position that Verizon’s claim was unsubstantiated.

A former legal advisor to FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, Angie Kronenberg, adamantly supported her old employer’s rule, emphasizing that the rule was made years ago now and it was time for Verizon to move on.

“This is not a First Amendment right that Verizon has,” she said. “The commission must address larger issues.

“We need to be having a different discussion. It’s time.”

However, no one made the argument as clearly as Crawford did, comparing Verizon’s role as a communications transport network to that of a sidewalk.

“The sidewalk is different from the conversation,” she said. “Right now we’re worried about the sidewalks unconstrained power to rise up and make more money by picking and choosing the particular conversations of which it approves.

“Indeed, the First Amendment and its protection of dissent and freedom of the press is demeaned by Verizon’s argument in this case.”

With oral arguments starting Monday, we’ll soon find out if the D.C. Circuit agrees.

Midday Links

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

The Signaling Value of MOOCs

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

As part of his long look at the U.S. education system, Wonkblog’s Dylan Matthews dives into the world of Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs). He notes that there haven’t been many academic studies on MOOCs and their performance compared to traditional college classes. Can an online class really provide the same level of education as one with an in-person professor? Matthews writes:

[T]he evidence shows that MOOCs have tremendous potential, especially for math and science and professional training. But it’s too soon to say if MOOCs are well-positioned to replace universities as a whole. To show that, one would need to somehow find out how to measure learning in topics as diverse as history or French language or theoretical physics, and conduct randomized comparisons of learning outcomes in all of them.

I’m sure in the coming years we’ll know more.

Matthews continues on to point out one of the common critiques of MOOCs: their signaling problem.

Signaling is the value in broadcasting your competence to potential employers and others. Graduating from college may help you get a job not just because it taught you particular skills but also because it makes employers confident that you’re the sort of person they want to hire.

…

MOOCs may become as good as traditional universities at building human capital. But they have a long way to go before having the same signaling value. Taking an MIT course on edX doesn’t do as much to get you a job as actually going to MIT would.

That’s true right now, but I see no reason why it needs to be the case. The problem is that in order for employers to value MOOCs at the same level as normal courses, you need to be able to credibly signal that you’ve learned the material from the course. At traditional colleges, that signaling comes in the form of the course credit and the grade you receive. The few colleges offering MOOCs for credit require you to be enrolled in the university and take a proctored final exam. If you have to pay tuition to earn credit, that eliminates the most valuable aspect of MOOCs: their price.

The ultimate goal, then, is to offer credit to students who take just an individual online course with no enrollment in college required. Students will have to take a final exam to demonstrate proficiency in the course so that credits are not just given away, but are earned by actually learning the material. And that final exam cannot be taken at the person’s house or a coffee shop. It must be proctored to eliminate cheating. Employers aren’t going to value course credit if they know students can easily cheat on the final.

Thus, the next step is to figure out how to proctor final exams for hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. That sounds like a logistical nightmare. Except it’s eminently doable. Pearson test centers already offer a number of different exams (GMAT, GRE, etc.)  at locations throughout cities all around the country. You pay a fee to take the test and Pearson offers a testing center that is extremely secure. The same system should be employed on a much larger scale for MOOCs, allowing students to receive credit for online classes. Even more, the tests could be designed like any standardized test so that every student would receive a score and percentile and employers could easily compare all applicants. Students at traditional colleges could quickly be tempted to take these exams too as a way to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material as well.

This will require a much larger infrastructure of online courses and Pearson testing centers. It’ll take some time to develop it all, but there’s no reason that MOOCs should have a problem with signaling. Let the MOOC revolution begin!