Support Net Neutrality
By: Christopher Smith
Date: September 14, 2006
Today, the Internet is a neutral medium. Data sent from wnymedia.net has the same priority across the wires as data sent from google.com. This manner of operation (aka common carriage) has been in practice for hundreds of years in the communications business. It has also made it possible for anyone with an internet connection and a dream to start their own company, communicate ideas, or find an innovative way to deliver software and services. Think of an Internet without Amazon, EBay, Netscape, Mozilla, or Google...all businesses that were based on the inherent advantages of common carriage and net neutrality.
In 2005, SBC Communications CEO, Ed Whitacre uttered the words that ignited a fierce debate over common carriage:
Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
A: How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!
This is a flawed argument. Why? Because Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Vonage all pay for the right to transmit data across the Internet. And so do you. In fact, everyone who accesses the network pays an access fee which is relative to the amount af data that is either consumed or transmitted. This fee based payment structure is not working to the advantage of the bottom line for SBC, Verizon, Comcast, or Time Warner. Thus, they lobby and lean on the House and Senate to change the rules of the game to bolster the bottom line.
When the rules of the game change, you lose, as does innovation and the open marketplace of ideas that is the Internet.
How do they want to change the game? The ISP's would like to establish contracts with content providers to provide faster delivery of their content and programming or to give them more prominent placement on search engine results or ISP pages. That means that content from CNN.com would now have priority over the traffic from smaller sites like this one. It is a violation of the inherent underlying agnostic methodology of the Internet itself. We currently have a real time, many-to-many communications system that doesn't make value judgements based on the source or destination of data traffic, it simply passes the data packets along.
Establishing ISP checkpoints along the Internet at which data validates itself as sourcing from a preferred provider would slow down all internet traffic by creating "toll booth" bottlenecks. It's really that simple.
To close up the discussion, let me give you a simple example of how a non-neutral Internet would work. If I'm a small startup company on the web that is selling a widget but selling it at a cheaper price than Amazon.com, I'm at a disadvantage. Why? Because Amazon signed a preferred content provider contract with Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and SBC. This contract stipulates that for a fee, Amazon's product listing and information will receive higher billing on search engine results and the data will arrive at desktops faster than from a company who hasn't signed a contract. This discourages innovation, competition, and entrepreneurial spirit. Sound like a free market to you? Me neither.
Support net neutrality.
Christopher Smith is the author of the blog BuffaloGeek.
© Christopher Smith, 2006.
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent those of the WNY Coalition for Progress.
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