Net Neutrality, Pro or Con? The notion of Net Neutrality has come to the fore front, as recently Obama has come out in favor of it. He stated, “Open net access should be seen as a basic right that all Americans should enjoy.” He also cited that over 4 million Internet enthusiasts, have given comment to regulators in favor of this as well. Opponents like Senator Ted Cruz, called it, “Obamacare for the Internet.” So this issue is unfortunately now wrapped up in identity politics. Let’s strip away the hype and see what this really means for us average users, more from a technical perspective.
First off, even the definition of Net Neutrality is in dispute. Here is Wikipedia’s view, which I think captures the most common belief: Net Neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication. The key words here are, “not discriminating or charging differentially.”
So we really don’t have Net Neutrality today. Certainly depending on your ISP, the “last mile” discrimination is high. Often depending on the infrastructure you have in your home locality. For information providers, this is not true either. It often depends on the infrastructure at the hosting website you have purchased. And yes there are discriminating costs structures already in place. The real issue is all the stuff (backbone) in the middle.
ISPs complain there are certain users that are the hogs (click here) and they want to charge for it. YouTube and NetFlix being the biggest hogs, with nearly half of all Internet traffic. When doing an iptrace from my office PC to the Blue Point Trading - Proprietary Trading Firm hosted website, I go through about 18 network hops and about 4 different ISPs. Sure I in effect pay for both ends of the connection, but who pays for the 2 ISPs in the middle to handle the traffic? Well today ISPs assume this responsibility under a Net Neutrality network design. For my website this is small, but what happens when you are a company that now is 50% of all traffic? In a sense the ISPs are subsidizing these Internet hog’s business, as half their infrastructure costs are to support these two users. The battle is really between two corporate interests, ISPs vs. large content providers. So don’t think it’s just big business against the little guy.
For the little guy, Net Neutrality could hurt you. ISPs could recoup costs, from the Internet hogs, to improve services to the masses. This is the innovation argument. On the other hand, once you start discriminating on price and service quality, you are in a position to effectively censor Internet traffic based upon all kinds of criteria. Such as cutting deals, where perhaps YouTube (or other content providers) works well in one area and not in another – because of the contractual and financial arrangements. The latter is the fear of Net Neutrality proponents.
Probably the FCC is going in the right direction of a hybrid regulatory solution. Net Neutrality for the bottom 95% users to protect the masses censorship rights, but allowing cost recovery from the Internet hogs, to encourage innovation. Just be aware that this means, that the Internet hogs may start charging for their services. However, what the FCC should do in addition, is limit the censorship criteria to bandwidth only and strictly prohibit censorship based upon content for any reason. This would include any special deals cut between ISPs and content providers.
Because most don’t understand the technology that drives the Internet, they have unrealistic expectations. The Internet is really a “tinker toy” network design, who’s birth came out of a bunch of geeky hobby enthusiast’s cool project, that then grew to be later commercialized. The Internet network design today makes little commercial sense and it will eventually die (as we know it) and so will the nostalgic idea of Net Neutrality. We may find that the future Internet will go back to the old Comp-U-Serve/AOL bulletin board server model, as content aggregators rule again, making it easier for infrastructure cost recovery and the government surveillance state to control the masses.
Blue Point Trading, William Thompson