Making Sense of Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is an issue that hopefully we will be hearing a lot more about, because it is an issue that affects us all, and one that few people even realize exists. One of the reasons why people haven't looked into it is because there have been conflicting and confusing reports on what it is and what the potential impact is, so I'll try to keep it simple.

Net Neutrality means that Internet Service Providers can charge for how much data is sent and received by its customers, but it cannot regulate the data based on its content. It doesn't matter if you're downloading porn, listening to streaming music, or emailing your grandma, the carriers must remain neutral and pass all data through equally. This rule was set up when the government first subsidized the creation of the Internet backbone that these carriers own, and it's been that way for years, but now the carriers are lobbying congress to change the rules. They want to be able to offer a higher Quality of Service (QoS) to customers who pay a premium. QoS is a method of handling traffic that affects data flow the most when your connection is saturated. It lets certain kinds of traffic take priority over others, serving up "premium" traffic and then passing along "bleacher seat" traffic when the premium traffic is done.

The argument the carriers give is that they should be able to charge people who serve up content like streaming movies and audio more than regular users. It stands to reason, they say, that theese users should pay more, since their content uses up more bandwidth (think of it as the volume of data passing through the pipe, much like measuring water usage). The flaw in this reasoning is that they already charge people a set rate for bandwidth when people sign up. As an example, a DSL user at home typically would pay a fee each month for a 1.5Mbps connection, which means that they are able to download 1.5 Megabits per second of data. They cannot go higher; the ISP will cap off the amount of data that is allowed to pass through that connection.

The ISPs will also claim that they must be allowed to regulate the data that passes over their networks, otherwise someone with a cable connection that is a heavy user could slow down everybody else's traffic. This argument doesn't really make any sense, because it's a problem that was solved back in the good old days of dial-up and ISDN connections: if someone is using up an inordinately large amount of bandwidth, you limit a) the connection speed, and b) the total amount of data they are allowed to download without paying extra. It's an easily solved billing issue.

So why bother? Why are the Internet backbone carriers spending big money to lobby Congress for the elimination of Net Neutrality requirements?

The first reason is the simplest, which I like to call the AOL reason. The carriers are trying to find a way to sell more bandwidth than they have, and QoS gives them an excuse to throw some traffic on the back burner in order to let their premium customers' content go through without expanding their service. I don't know if you remember the whole debacle in the 1990's where AOL was selling more subscriptions than it could actually give service to, resulting in customers not being able to connect for hours and sometimes days on end. This would be the equivalent of AOL setting up premium accounts, where customers who were willing to pay an extra $20 a month would get their own dedicated access numbers while the regular customers were still getting the busy signal.

The second reason is plain old greed. It essentially amounts to extortion of the larger customers who are serving up content, but I think there is another huge reason why they are trying to get this legislation passed quickly and silently. There are very few applications that legitimately need very high throughput, and the biggest of these is Voice Over IP (VOIP). VOIP is the ability to make phone calls over the Internet, which costs much, much less than a standard phone call, and the Internet backbone carriers are --you guessed it -- telephone companies. One company already tried blocking VOIP traffic over their networks, but a court ruled it illegal. With the erosion of Net Neutrality rules, not only would that no longer be illegal, but there would also be other ramifications. Yahoo and SBC already have a business relationship. What would stop Yahoo from making a deal with SBC to block their customers from using Google? For that matter, what would stop them from purposedly slowing down streaming video traffic for all users that refuse to pay for their "premium" service? I have streaming videos on my blog, but I can't afford to pay extra money on top of my hosting fees for that.

I hope I've explained it well enough, but if you still need more convincing, Ask a Ninja.