The FCC's Gated Community

How would you like to live in a gated community?

I've heard they tend to be safer. In a regular neighborhood, anybody is allowed to walk the public streets. They might look at you. They might see your front yard. They might be slovenly, or sing loudly and drunkenly. Of course, you are perfectly able and allowed to lock your door. If they go onto your lawn, they are trespassing and you can call the police. If they break into your house, it is a crime and they can be prosecuted. But there's nothing to stop them from walking the street.

In a gated community, they can't get in. The gate guard has a list of requirements that anybody has to meet before entering. You have to buzz your way in and have him unlock the gate for you. Why doesn't everyone live in a gated community? It's so much safer, isn't it?

Thing is, as people who have left gated communities can tell you, giving someone the authority to prevent people on the street from entering also means giving someone the authority to determine who you can have access to from within the community. If they decide that your own mother looks too much like a redneck, you can only meet with her by leaving the safety of the gate behind. Furthermore, you alone cannot decide who will meet this criteria, when and how often the criteria will change, and how much you will have to pay for it. Hopefully, you have a system in which you at least have to have a majority of the community agree.

Now suppose you were living quietly in your neighborhood when, one morning, the most prominent neighbor decides that it will be a gated community. By lunchtime, the gates are up, and at suppertime, someone goes door to door handing you a pamphlet letting you know who will now be allowed onto your street for your safety. From now on, your neighbor can decide, at any time, who can enter and who cannot. Of course, this means that your neighbor can decide that his stinky party friends can enter and roister until dawn, but yours cannot. There is no guarantee that there will be no parties, or that nobody who enters will break into your house. You can only hope that your prominent neighbor is good-natured and good-willed... as well as all of his descendants, for as long as your family lives there.

When the FCC declared the Internet to be under its command, it basically did just that. The FCC is the government body that decides which radio stations are allowed to broadcast based on whether their content serves "the public interest". The FCC is the government body that decides which television shows are allowed to run during "family hour", and the reason why Die Hard is now linked with the phrase "melon farmer". The FCC created and enforced the Ma Bell monopoly, in which one corporation was allowed to provide all telephone services in the country. That only changed in the mid-90's and, even then, only under the FCC's careful control.

The Republican ruling that is making people scream that you now have no internet privacy left at all merely returns the role of internet safety to the FTC. It does the equivalent of taking down the gated community which was established by your neighbor acting alone. Yes, you may have slovenly people allowed to walk the street again. Yes, your front garden still may be seen from the road. Yes, you can still put up your own fences and lock your own doors. None of that has changed.

But now, your neighbor can't decide that your mother can't enter his gated community.

If you really want to live in a gated community, the answer is to go find one, not to get the government to force everybody to live in one.