Time to take a second and rant about net neutrality. You’ll find net neutrality discussions raging on just about any tech or internet related forum this week, with even the mainstream media getting their hands in the pot. Some claim that legislating net neutrality will stifle innovation and lead to the demise of free market capitalism, and others claiming that not legislating net neutrality will likely mean the downfall of the American section of the internet.
Net neutrality, in a nutshell, is the idea that the internet service providers, such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon should not give special treatment to the data flowing through their networks. For the most part, its the way the internet works right now. On a non-neutral network, the ISPs could give more priority to traffic of their choice, or degrade the speed of traffic of their choice. Comcast, for example, might degrade traffic from Hulu so that customers would be deterred from using it and instead use their service, or it could give special treatment to traffic from their own streaming offerings.
As you can see, there is a clear conflict of interest in some cases. John McCain sponsored a bill this past week, ironically dubbed the Internet Freedom Act, which would bar the FCC or other government bodies from regulating the internet or ISPs. That’s the same John McCain that doesn’t know how to check his email, in case you were wondering. Right wingers have pushed the idea that we should let the free market take care of itself, that the government only wants net neutrality to get its hands further around the internet, net neutrality would be the new fairness doctrine, and it would put a stranglehold on the ISPs and innovation.
In the words of Penn and Teller, bullshit.
The clear thing to understand in the debate about net neutrality is that the net is already neutral. The FCC is at this time only seeking to make it official, and bar ISPs from changing this. In a non neutral environment, the ISPs ultimately would control the internet. The would have the power to slow down traffic from less popular sites, or sites that don’t pay a special fee, while big players like Google and Amazon would likely have to pay to get their traffic through quickly.
There are a few other clear conflicts of interest here. In the case of Comcast, who is positioning themselves to buy NBC Universal, what happens to the traffic from, say, CBS? How about Verizon and AT&T. Do they let Skype and other VOIP services through unmolested?
Some of you may be listening to the rhetoric coming from the side of the ISPs, saying they should have the right to prioritize traffic from hospitals and the health care institution because it could be very time sensitive. That all this talk about extra payment is speculation and that the ISPs would use this power for good.
I’d point to a couple of things. First, Comcast has already shown how it “manages it’s network” with the bittorrent fiasco last year. Comcast decided to throttle bittorrent to near unusable speeds when they determined its a popular method for sharing files. The problem, of course, is that bittorrent is not solely used to abuse copyright. A stop was put to this by the FCC last year as well.
AT&T and Verizon have shown via their text messaging costs that they have no problem charging extra just for changing where the traffic is coming from. Even though they both support unlimited data plans (which actually has limits, but we’ll save that for later), they charge exorbitant rates for text messaging, even though it’s just data. In fact, for those of you doing the math, it might cost as much as a thousand per gigabyte.
The problem of net neutrality is exacerbated by the lack of choice in providers in the US. I have exactly two choices for providers where I am – Comcast Cable and Qwest DSL. The DSL service is generally slower, while a little cheaper. But both Comcast and Qwest are pushing for the Internet Freedom Act. My choice seems to be between bad and worse.
So why would McCain sponsor a bill that seems so anti-consumer? I’ll just leave this here, and let you decide for yourself. It seems to me that on one side, we have ISPs, Telcos, lobbyists and the politicians, and on the other we have everyone else.
Jon Stewart had some thoughts about net neutrality, which I will leave you with.
The weekly rant is a space for me to yammer on about all those frustrating things I find on the internet, with technology, and life in general. Watch out for heated discussion and NSFW language.
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