Education Week - January 17, 2018 - 10

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > TRACKING NEWS AND IDEAS IN EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
www.digitaldirections.org

K-12 Districts Advised on Rights in Post-'Net Neutrality' Era
By Sean Cavanagh

We want to
provide practical
advice to districts.
Are there things
they can do?"
KEITH KRUEGER
Consortium for School Networking

jr size

As school districts weigh the impact of losing assurances of "net
neutrality," a professional organization is encouraging them to protect themselves upfront against a
potential decline in the speed and
quality of their web access.
The Consortium for School Networking has released a tip sheet
for district officials on contentdelivery practices they should require in contracts with internetservice providers.
The organization, which represents K-12 technology leaders,
concedes that the document is
premised on some speculation and
guesswork. That's because it's unclear how school systems' internet
access will be affected-if at all-
by last month's closely watched
and divisive policy change approved by the Federal Communications Commission.

"I don't think we're saying we
have a magic bullet in a postnet-neutrality world," said Keith
Krueger, the consortium's CEO.
"We want to provide practical advice to districts. Are there things
they can do? Are there protections
they can put in place?"
Meanwhile, lawmakers in at
least three states are seeking to
fight the FCC's policy change,
with legislative proposals aimed at
guarding net-neutrality principles
in their states. FCC officials have
suggested the state efforts won't
hold up under legal scrutiny.
Net neutrality is the idea that
internet-service providers should
not be allowed to treat web traffic
differently, slowing some content
and prioritizing other material
based on an organization's ability
to pay for faster service or other
factors.
Like many ed-tech organizations, COSN has argued that the

Get a sneak peek
at the new
Leaders for
our 2018 season
Superintendent Emmanuel
Caulk is executing on a
plan to restore confidence
in Kentucky's Fayette
County school system
where financial troubles
and inattention to lowincome, nonwhite, and
special education students
had drawn criticism.

MEET
Emmanuel
LIVE EVENT
Caulk
SUPERINTENDENT
Fayette County Public Schools
Lexington, Ky.

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 17, 2018 | www.edweek.org

APRIL 11-12, 2018
WASHINGTON, D.C.

leaders.edweek.org

FCC's Dec. 14 vote to dismantle
Obama-era net-neutrality protections was a mistake that could
potentially hurt schools.
That policy decision, championed by Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, reversed a twoyear-old order designed to protect
net neutrality. The earlier order
forbade internet-service companies from blocking or throttling
content-basically degrading or
impairing the flow of traffic-or
engaging in "paid prioritization"
of content.
Pai has argued the 2015 policy
was federal overreach that has
stymied innovations by internetservice providers that could benefit web users. He says fears that
the companies will engage in bad
practices are overblown.
Some school leaders and librarians, however, fear that the FCC's
change will result in slowing the
flow of educational content-such
as videos, games, and curricula-
that teachers and students rely on.
Others worry that without net
neutrality, internet-service providers will give preferential treatment to the wealthiest companies
and education content providers,
while slowing online resources created by small, potentially innovative businesses.
COSN advises districts to take
the following steps to protect
themselves:
* They should closely review
their service-level agreements
with vendors and make sure they
include specific metrics on internet
performance. The metrics should
include the "entire complement
of internet traffic," regardless of
what internet protocol, or network
delivery system, is used by the
district.
* They should ask their internet-service providers for written
assurances that there will be no
"preferential treatment" for content, based on site origination or
destination, internet protocol, and
other factors.
Overall, district technology
leaders should not hesitate, when
negotiating with internet-service
providers, to "ask them pointblank: 'What is your policy on
this?' " said Marie Bjerede, the
principal of leadership initiatives
for COSN.

States Poised for Fight
One lingering question for K-12
officials is how easily they would
be able to determine with any certainty that their online content
was being slowed or throttled-
or if the traffic flow is slowing
down for another reason, related
to a website, network, or capacity
problem.
Ron Reyer, the director of technology services for the Bethel
Park school district in Pennsylvania, said answering those questions is far from simple. But K-12

officials have the right to ask internet-service companies to provide details on their performance
in ensuring fast delivery of content, said Reyer, who worked with
a group of school officials who
contributed ideas for the COSN
document.
The goal should be to "engage
vendors, content providers, and
[districts] in a three-way conversation on, 'How are we going to solve
our problem?' " Reyer said.
Fred Campbell, the director of
Tech Knowledge, a free-market
think tank and a supporter of
Pai's policy, said he sees no harm
in COSN's advice to districts. But
he also does not believe that internet-service providers are about
to change their practices in ways
that will undermine schools. Districts are "enterprise customers,"
and internet-service providers
have an incentive to make them
happy.
"I'd be very surprised if it is ever
necessary," Campbell said of the
COSN document. "I see very little
to be gained [for those companies]
in blocking that content."
The consortium's document
notes that groups of districts
served by the same internetservice provider will have more
leverage with those companies in
negotiating contract provisions
than would individual school systems. Districts that have a choice
of more than one provider will
have that negotiating power, too,
said Krueger.
But many districts have few options, he noted: 43 percent of district technology officials surveyed
by COSN last year said they have
only one internet-service provider
available to them.
"If you're in a place with no competition, there's no recourse if your
provider doesn't want to" maintain
an unrestricted flow of web traffic,
Krueger said.
In some state capitals, lawmakers are already taking steps aimed
at preserving net neutrality. Bills
introduced in a number of states-
including California, Massachusetts, and Nebraska-seek to preserve internet conditions that they
say existed before the passage of
the FCC's order in December. In
addition, some state attorneys
general have vowed to sue to block
the federal policy.
FCC officials responded to an
Education Week inquiry about the
state legislation by pointing to
language in Pai's order that seeks
to pre-empt any state or local policies that contradict the FCC's new
policy.
The commission's order preempts any state or local policies
that "could pose an obstacle to
or place an undue burden on the
provision of broadband internetaccess service," the order says,
"and conflict with the deregulatory approach" adopted by the
FCC.

http://www.digitaldirections.org http://leaders.edweek.org http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - January 17, 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - January 17, 2018