I’d like to take this opportunity to invite anyone interested in joining the fledgling Digi-Docket blog that I have started with my wife Mandy to discuss matters both technological and legal. Interested? Send me an email at curtis.bunner@gmail.com and I’ll create an account for you.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to be an expert at either law or technology. The nexus of the two is relatively unexplored and will only become more important to our society as technology continues its inexorable expansion towards ubiquity.
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Net Neutrality
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As you can probably guess by the following list of articles, I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the topic of Net Neutrality:
Editorial: “Network neutrality” or “network neutering”?
EU taunts US: Net neutrality’s better here
FCC to investigate “gating” role of middle-mile access lines
The Internet is about to die. Literally die!
GOP senators: Net neutrality rule making must be bipartisan
Line sharing best solution for slow, expensive US broadband
FCC proposes network neutrality rules (and big exemptions)
House, Senate get separate bills to kill net neutrality
Did Congress really give the FCC power to protect the ‘Net?
EU adopts “Internet freedom” provision on Internet cut-offs
The ramifications of this issue would be technologically profound, and set legal precedent for years to come. At stake is the right of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to control what types of content or services they allow or prioritize on their networks, and the essential freedom that has allowed the Internet to grow to its present size and complexity.
The lobbying sides are pretty clearly drawn. ISPs (i.e. telecom companies) are opposed to Net Neutrality and want to control what types or content or services are allowed or prioritized on their networks. Content and service providers (Google, Vonage, etc) are in support of Net Neutrality and want equal access to bandwidth on ISP networks.
Consumers fall somewhere in the grey area between, as the “benefits” to them vary depending on which argument you agree with. An anti-Net Neutrality argument might state that without the ability to control content and services provided, there’s no way distinguish the heavy users and services from the less bandwidth intensive ones, leaving ISPs with lost profits. A pro-Net Neutrality argument might state that without free and equal access to Internet bandwidth, the level playing field will be lost and incentives for innovation will be stifled.
Which side makes the best argument? I don’t really know, to be honest. But given that bills are being passed in Congress as we speak which will (in a sense) determine the long-term fate of the Internet, it might be worth some thought.
Anyone interested in a discussion?
The internet exists in most of our minds as some sort of cloud full of information, media, and users who constantly push the boundaries and expand the breadth of the internet. The real issue with this particular way of considering the internet is that each of us does not have a big cloud collecting device sitting in the back of our house to collect it. This creates a market for cloud collecting, or more accurately in providing a connection to the information contained in the cloud.
I really do see both sides of the arguments as containing some very valid points and I understand that there is no clear right and wrong answer to this, at least to me. I think a solution needs to be reached somewhere in the middle of the problem. The closest allegory I can draw would be our toll based highways. When you drive your personal car down the road you are expected to pay the same as someone else driving a car next to you. That is fair in my mind, but we run into a problem when we talk about larger vehicles.
If we say that the average internet user drives a full sized car, we can imagine how much we might charge that person. If I were to tack on a third wheel trailer, or say a healthy addiction to streaming video in case of internet use, we might be charged more because we take up more of the road and cause added stress. More weight on the road is somewhat comparable to larger amounts of data being transferred. If I take up the space of two full cars on the road, I should pay more than some in just one car.
Now the really hard part of making this a fair and rational comparison comes when we try and relate how extra weight on the road and extra bandwidth actually work. If I am about to move a large amount of normal things on the road, I might rent a larger truck or other moving device that would charge me more to save on the number of trips I need to take. Normal internet traffic, by contrast, is something no one is likely to try and move in bulk to save on time. A moving van or truck on a road would be something like not using the internet for a month, then connecting and sending two months worth of emails all at once while going on an internet binge trying to make up for lost time.
People who use more bandwidth are going to continue to do so because they use services that consume large amounts of bandwidth. So do we treat bandwidth like gas? The more you need, the more you pay for? Suddenly sites like Hulu or Pandora become semi premium because you need to buy the more expensive internet simply to use what is now a free service. How do places that charge for amped up versions of those streaming services, like Netflix Streaming, hope to compete?
So do we charge the same amount for any amount of network use? Who is going to pay to help bridge the gap along the “last mile” between the local hubs and individual houses? As someone who constantly sees my cable modem drop from the promised ten mega bytes per second to less than one during peak hours, I can say this is going to become a serious issue if we don’t solve it now.
Do we preserve these same rules for the new mobile network traffic? Is your phone call with your mom more important during peak hours than my streaming of last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother? Without regulation we are going to run into different pay structures. With regulation we are going to remove the incentive for these companies to improve their networks.
Right now, at least for me, there are way too many unanswered questions. I simply cannot support Net Neutrality out right. I am going to catch some flack about how the internet has always been free and how different pay structures are going to kill the freedom and spirit of the internet, but to be honest the internet has never been asked to contain and stream this much content. Ten years ago streaming video was a joke, five years ago it was a fad, now it is something a huge number of people do daily.
I think the turnpike analogy is fair, insofar as the U.S. is our only perspective. Some of the links in my post are to articles about the Net Neutrality situation over in Europe that show quite the opposite effect of regulation and net neutrality than what would be inferred from a U.S.-centric position. Namely, by using regulation to force ISPs to compete with other providers on existing “roads,” Europeans have access to faster connections at a lower cost. A win-win for consumers and clearly not the end-of-the-world for ISPs in Europe (since they are still profitable).
Perhaps the multiple-perspectives thing is what has really caused me to question the no-regulation chants from those opposing Net Neutrality. It seems to work pretty well in Europe, after all. But maybe I’m drawing a false analogy?