Among the likes of the car, indoor plumbing, irrigation, and penicillin, the internet is celebrated as one of humanities greatest inventions. It has allowed people all over the world to have an insurmountable wealth of knowledge available instantly at their fingertips. With over three billion people connected, the dream of having a truly interconnected world will soon become a reality. With something of such gratuitous importance, debates about how to handle the future of the internet are both voluminous and passionate; what happens to the internet affects the entire world.
All the different parts of the internet make claims to being absolutely vital to making the internet what it is. Internet Service Providers like Comcast and AT&T claim that because they are the final piece that delivers content directly to users, they are the most important. Content providers such as Google, Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft all claim to be more significant because, without content, users would have no reason to go online. This symbionticism makes one thing very clear; no entity or industry has any type of ownership over the internet.
Even though Net Neutrality is a hot topic, there are many misconceptions that sway people either for or against it. Joe Nocera of the New York Times describes Net Neutrality as “…the principle that calls for the Internet to remain free and open — with no “fast lanes” that would allow some content providers to take priority over others.” (Nocera, 2015) This definition does not explicitly describe what net neutrality is, but rather tells us what it is not. This is because Net Neutrality is not the presence of anything, but the absence of what many today are calling “internet fast lanes”. These fast lanes are provided by ISPs to content providers to allow data to reach end users more quickly. Content from websites like Netflix would reach users faster or slower depending on how much bandwidth the content provider is paying for. This concept is the basis of what ISPs are arguing for, and what many content providers are arguing against.
Gautham Nagesh of the Wall Street Journal explains why a U.S. appeals court threw out Net Neutrality rules in 2014 that were adopted in 2010 by the FCC “The court said the FCC saddled broadband providers with the same sorts of obligations as traditional “common carrier” telecommunications services, such as landline phone systems, even though the commission had explicitly decided not to classify broadband as a telecom service.” (Nagesh, 2014) Once a decision like this is made in an appeals court, it is exceedingly difficult to overturn. This means that if the FCC were to try and enforce a new set of Net Neutrality rules on ISPs, they would have to reclassify them as “common carriers”.
While most consumers in America are firmly in favor of Net Neutrality, none seem to acknowledge the many consequences such policies could have. People like the idea of being able to stream as much Netflix and YouTube videos as they please, but fail to realize that with Net Neutrality, the prevalent problem of network congestion arises. While bandwidth is not a limited resource in the same sense that water is, it still requires a significant amount of capital to transmit large amounts of data over thousands of miles. Jonathan Feldman of Information Weekly says that it is “…impossible to let folks be “free” with a non-free resource. Bandwidth costs capital investment money, as any network engineer will tell you. And basic economics tells us that demand for any desirable good or service approaches infinity as its price approaches zero.” (Feldman, 2014)
Monetary benefits of fast lanes are clear, but another issue presents a strong argument against Net Neutrality. The United States of America is founded firmly on a capitalist view of economics. Most businesses are allowed to succeed and fail based on their own practices. The protection of the consumer comes in the form of competition. If a company’s prices are too high compared to other products of similar purpose, it will fail.
Today, according to CNET.com’s Joan Solsman, Netflix traffic makes up almost one third of all internet traffic during peak hours. (Solsman, 2013) This has led to Netflix taking abnormally long to buffer videos during such hours. While congestion is a concern for any large scale network, many believe there are other reasons for slow Netflix speeds. Mark Taylor of Level 3 (a Tier 1 Network that transfers data between different ISPs and various content providers) states that “[ISPs] are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content.’ While Taylor doesn’t name names, he describes the six offenders as ‘large broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market.’”(Webster) This suggests that Comcast is purposely slowing Netflix down on the way to the end user.
Companies like AT&T claim that if Net Neutrality is permanently abolished, prices for internet will go down (Brodkin, 2014).
Why would Comcast throttle Netflix, effectively making not only Netflix’s, but their own service worse? The first reason is a severe lack of competition. While Comcast claims it competes with an ISP in almost every market it provide service in, they fail to mention that none of this competition is with other large broadband ISPs such as AT&T and Time Warner. They compete with smaller, slower ISPs like CenturyLink and Earthlink. These DSL ISPs do not have the same type of infrastructure as the large broadband cable companies do that allow them to provide high-speed internet. In reality, what Comcast calls competition is really a façade to hide the fact that there is no reasonable option to get quality internet other than them. On top of all that, the four biggest ISPs compete in virtually no markets against one another. While monopoly might not be the right term for these companies, oligopoly may be.
The preceding explains why Comcast does not suffer from throttling Netflix, but fails to explain how they benefit. While Comcast is the biggest ISP in America, it also happens to be the biggest cable television provider in America. The corporate giant delivers every single television show available to users following the aforementioned “pay to play” model. Not only do they stream live shows to users, they also have an extensive “on demand” section where users can instantly play, without buffering, thousands of TV shows and movies that either come with the channels they subscribe to, or can be paid for in order to stream instantly. With Netflix charging a nominal fee of eight dollars to stream an unlimited amount of movies and TV shows from their own library of thousands, Comcast is in a position that invokes serious conflicts of interest. With no Net Neutrality laws in place, and virtually no competition, Comcast has actual incentive to make Netflix a lesser experience for users.
Beginning backwards with more philosophical ideas, the Internet is simply inimitable. The comparison against water or electricity in and of itself is simply irrelevant, because they are not even remotely similar in what they provide. Water is for drinking. Electricity is for powering things. The internet has no bounds on what it is for. Entertainment, learning, teaching, communicating, shopping. The list is endless. Allowing it to be even remotely analogous to anything else we have in this world would be doing humanity a disservice. Claiming the internet needs to be handled like electricity or treated like cable television is narrow minded and unoriginal. The internet needs to be treated like the internet. This means that using ideas that were formulated for things so different from the internet, and trying to apply them, just isn’t going to work. Companies like Comcast may not like it, nor may many conservative politicians, but Net Neutrality is something society must embrace if the internet is to continue to grow and allow us to benefit from it at levels even greater than we already have.
On February 26th, the FCC passed new regulations that are designed to protect the free flow of information, and did so by applying the concepts of Net Neutrality (Snider, 2015). While this is a big win for supporters of Net Neutrality, the fight is far from over.
@ll is fair on the internet... and war 