My first post about net neutrality was greeted with much skepticism by some of my conservative friends. In particular, Matt, who claims to be The Only Republican” in San Francisco , has an answer for those who say that the construction of a two-tiered internet by giant Telecos where big companies will pay a fee so that their sites and search engines receive favored treatment on the “information highway” is a trojan horse of sorts; that in fact, the concept of net neutrality is a way for government to control the net at the “router” level:
You should not be surprised that the loudest advocates of ‘net neutrality are those on the far left, including MyDD, and MoveOn. Their arguments are very much in line with things like McCain-Feingold and the old Fairness Doctrine.It is also being sold as “fear the big bad corporationsâ€. I don’t have any particular affection for any of the companies involved here, but I do know that customers know best. Some customers might indeed say, I will pay more for better video. Alternatively, the market may say “we like it the way it isâ€, which is neutrality de facto. In either case, we don’t need Congress or the FCC to make the call.
The history of the Internet has told us we should imagine the unimagined. Let’s preserve the absence of inhibition that has gotten us this far. Keep it libertarian. No new laws.
Read Matt’s entire piece which he calls a “Primer” for Conservatives on the issue.
This is all well and good. And there may be a way to address some of Matt’s concerns in the current Telecommunications Reform bill that just passed the Energy and Commerce Committee and where a net neutrality amendment went down to defeat. But is there a real threat?
Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet’s First Amendment—a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you—based on what site pays them the most. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to have its Web site open quickly on your computer.Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.
This isn’t just speculation—we’ve already seen what happens elsewhere when the Internet’s gatekeepers get too much control. Last year, Telus—Canada’s version of AT&T—blocked their Internet customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to workers with whom the company was having a labor dispute. And Madison River, a North Carolina ISP, blocked its customers from using any competing Internet phone service.
To my mind, the potential is certainly there for mischief by both government and large corporations. The difference is that we can keep on eye on government and influence potential troublemaking a lot easier than we can at Comcast.
The New York Times has come out four square for net neutrality:
One of the Internet’s great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft’s home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate. Providers could also block access to sites they do not like.
In another comment on my post, Matt has a pretty good response:
You don’t need to trust the telcos. Your supermarket can offer any product it wants, ditto the PC companies, ad infinitum, and these industries are serving consumers extremely well. The only place where customers are not served well are regulated utilities. That is exactly the model that the neutrality proponents are advocating.
Commenter “AM” says it’s all much ado about nothing:
There are some applications for which success falls from 100% to 0% at a particular latency and packet-loss threshold. The only way the service provider can assure that these applications will work when the net is under load is to provide differentiated services.This is a technical issue, not a political one. Dont be conned – get informed.
Before your eyes glaze over, here’s “Cosmoreaxer” who agrees with him:
This has been covered for weeks on Digg, and it’s pretty clear if you take a moment to read more: This is the cable and telcos vs. the online content providers like Amazon and Yahoo. It’s not about the corporations trying to keep the little guy down, it’s about the corporations fighting with other corporations about whether to move certain packets (basically, video and VoIP) over the net faster than other packets (less intense, non-streaming info, i.e. e-mail and the web).That’s it. This is what you’re shrieking like an anti-capitalist street protester about?
In fact, I’ve read that same complaint about net neutrality on several sites; that if you don’t stream a lot of video and VoIP, you’re basically paying for those who do. That’s an issue I would like someone to explain to me (just like you would explain it to your 5 year old child). Is it fair to ask people to pay for internet services they don’t use? And if that kind of service can be differentiated, isn’t it a matter of fairness that sites that use the tremendous bandwidth it takes to stream video pay more than those who don’t?
These are tough questions because they are 1) so highly technical that people like me feel totally inadequate in addressing; and 2) the answer appears to depend on what side of the liberal/conservative divide you come down on.
But is this really a “political” issue in the sense that it is right vs. left? I would love to be able to find a consensus as we did on the FEC regs that came down last winter. However, that seemed to be pretty straightforward as an issue of free speech. This net neutrality business makes me feel like I’m walking through cotton candy.
What we need is a good old fashioned debate with point/counterpoint responses and done in as non-technical a manner as possible. For all you geeks out there (and I use that term affectionately because I have tremendous admiration for your skills and knowledge) bless your hearts but when you start talking about “packets” and “load” I want to place my hands around your necks and squeeze. Please remember that many if not most us are computer klutzes and need a “Special Ed” approach to any technical issues.
One thing is for sure: There will be times over the next few years when we will be defending internet freedoms from both government and gigantic corporations. When you look at the growth of commerce on the net over just the last 5 years, you realize that big government and big corporations are like blood hounds who have picked up the scent.
And what they’re smelling is money – lots of it. It looks to me we may need that “Army of Davids” if we’re going to protect the net from the kind of intrusions that would alter our enjoyment and our quest for knowledge.
UPDATE
Firedoglake weighs in criticizing former Clinton politico Mike McCurry for his piece on HuffPo with typical gentleness, thoughtfulness, and understatement:
Tell us again, Mike you lying sellout, how we online activists are just a bunch of clueless, uncouth whiney kids. . . with whom the New York Times apparently agrees. Chris Bowers exposes the lying bulls**t about netroots activists you, Joe Klein and your other pecksniff power pimp sellouts keep hawking at the corner of 17th and L.
Let’s have a look at the names in your lobbying firm, shall we? Oooh, Randy Tate, one of the founders of the Christian Coalition. Tell me again, Mike, about your Democratic bona fides, how we should all be civil and moderate in tone? Let’s check out your clients. Oooooh. . . the Republican National Committee! Well, how-dee-doo! And the Lincoln Chaffee endorsing Sierra Club makes an appearance here, as do both the ACLU and the Department of Homeland Security. Interesting! Would any financial supporters of the ostensibly progressive groups on this list like to send a little note to them about Mike’s firm’s conflicts of interest?
Ed Cone is also disgusted by McCurry’s shilling for the telecos.
I’m guessing former Clinton mouthpiece Mike McCurry meant to sound tough and bloggy with this post about net neutrality.
It really didn’t work. He sounds like an angry insider who can’t believe a bunch of nobodies dared to challenge him.
Yeah, it’s rough out there in the comments, but you have to stay cool and on point.
It helps to mix a little Google into your act, too: McCurry sounds ignorant when he calls Vint Cerf “Vince.”
That’s one thing I would like to see addressed in ethics legislation; the “revolving door” in Washington. People should not be able to move from either Executive or Congressional branches of government into private lobbying gigs for at least 10 years. That sounds draconian but it’s just getting ridiculous.
UPDATE II: ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE
In the post above, I asked for a simple explanation of some of the issues. Not only have some excellent comments been left below (See Andy and Cosmoreax especially) but Dale Franks at Q & O has a great post on the issue as well.
Ain’t the internets somethin’?
12:39 pm
When it is the will of the person, spoken on part of the will of the people, when any person might accomplish the same task (blogging) then it is fundamentaly neutral. There is no need for any intervention.
1:15 pm
Rick,
I think the “information superhighway” analogy works here. What if our interstate highway system suddenly became an all-toll system with priority going to those who paid the largest fees? I think our interstate system is an apt analogy in this case.
For the internet, I already pay a lot of money for a high-bandwidth connection. Any user who wants that kind of connection pays extra money for it. In turn, my ISP pays money to lease the bandwidth their users uses. Websites also pay for the bandwidth they use. Sites with a lot of video streaming will have bigger bandwidth bills than those who don’t. So both sides of the equation, the websites and end users, are already paying premiums for that kind of content. What the telecoms want to do is add another middleman that we’d all have to pay by charging a toll to use the main data trunks for the internet. It’s easy to see why they’d want this extra revenue stream, but it seems to me it would screw-up everything that is good and liberating about the internet. We need to keep the system we have and instead of adding middle-man to pay, ISP’s and web hosts should pay a small extra fee depending on the amount of bandwidth they use to pay for mainentance and expansion of the main trunk-lines. I think that’s reasonable. Everyone will bear the cost in proportion to the bandwidth they use, but there won’t be any inherent limits unlike the flawed system the telco’s propose.
1:31 pm
I’ll start with Andy’s analogy, but come to a very different conclusion.
The Interstate Highway analogy isn’t perfect, but I agree with Andy that it will do the job for this discussion. However, the impact of a non-neutral net isn’t quite as Andy described (tolls being charged for everyone). Rather, it’s more like what’s happened out here in California where we now have some toll roads that operate in parallel with the Interstate Highway system. These toll roads charge a toll to people who decide to travel on them because of their lower congestion. Nobody HAS to travel on them, and everybody can get to where they want to go just as they used to before there was a toll road (actually, the existence of the toll road actually improves the situation for everyone else, to the extent that it removes traffic from the Interstate).
On the Internet, the “backbone providers” are roughly analogous to the Interstate Highway system. Today, everybody gets to put their packets on the backbone and everybody gets treated equally. Actually, that’s not precisely true—the backbone is already rife with special routing agreements. These are the equivalent of private connecting toll roads between Interstates, wherein one telecomm company pays another to route traffic via these special routes. So to this limited extent, the net is already not “net neutral”—but this hasn’t caused any brouhaha because nobody’s asking an end-user customer to pay for this (at least, not to my knowledge).
What the backbone providers are proposing sounds to me much like these toll roads we have out here. They’re proposing to provide an especially fast service for those sites who are willing to pay for it. Generally speaking, of course, that will be those sites that have a commercial interest in high performance. So what exactly is wrong with this? It’s not as though non-paying sites are going to get any slower—they’re not. They can still take that same old Interstate Highway they used to take. The companies who choose to take the toll road get extra service in return for their payment. How do any of us lose on that deal?
There’s only one sense in which I can see that Joe Six-Pack loses: it’s if you believe that the backbone providers will increase the capacity of the backbone anyway, to make their biggest customers happy—and then we all get to take a free ride on the big new highway they build. To me, this seems naive and silly—without the incentive of extra revenue, the backbone providers have NO incentive to build extra capacity to make everything run smooth and fast. Instead, they have every profit incentive to build just barely enough capacity to allow them to charge for all the traffic, and not one bit more. They make the same revenue for a slow delivery as they do for a fast delivery.
What they’re proposing sounds to me like a perfectly good business-like, captilist move: they see a market need, and they’d like to provide a service to serve it.
I think we should let them.
3:27 pm
Isn’t one of the issues with this new scheme that providers can choose which websites they can allow or disallow? If indeed carriers can exclude sites that they disagree with, how is this different than what most Americans dislike about the way, say, google is acting in China?
5:03 pm
Tom,
If it’s as you describe, then I would be OK with that, but it doesn’t sound like that from the descriptions I’ve read. It sounds like they will take the existing backbone and institute a priority scheme on it. If they want to create additional backbone capacity and charge for it things like guaranteed throughput, then that is ok. But taking the existing backbone and fundamentally changing its routing rules is not. There also must be a mechanism in any change to ensure the regular public “highway” is upgraded as needed.
I also haven’t seen any discussion of how this will work in an international context. Since traffic from websites based in foreign countries will likely travel on 2 or 3 backbones, does that mean the site will have to pay 2 or 3 different companies?
In my mind, there are still too many unanswered questions and the telco’s haven’t been forthcoming with details.
5:53 pm
Tom’s got it right here.
I concur that the highway analogy is inapt, but if we are going to use it, let’s point out a way that it works against Andy’s (and so far, Rick’s) argument. Think of the 18-wheelers who have to pay higher taxes to drive on the same highway you do. Why? They’re heavier, do more damage to the highway, basically they’re using the resources more than you or me.
So why don’t those who use more bandwith pay more? After all, bandwidth is getting tighter and tighter, and as Adam Penenburg (he’s the guy who caught Stephen Glass) in Slate earlier this year, 80% of traffic now is P2P file sharing.
Shouldn’t they pay for it? Or, the telecoms want Google and Yahoo to pay for it. Either way, right now you’re subsidizing the tiny percentage of people who use a lot more bandwidth than most of us.
And one more on the highway comparison. The Internet is many networks, not one. It is much more redundant than the national highway system. The analogy isn’t very good. But that doesn’t mean I won’t use it against itself!
Plus, I’d think twice before agreeing with Jane Hamsher on anything.
And Rick, my gratitude. That quote wasn’t calling YOU a street protester, it was another commenter.
6:08 pm
Alexandra, the telecoms have already agreed not to block sites. There was much whining from the anti-corporate left until they did, and now they’re still whining, natch.
The thing about if you have content, you want it on all the networks. Conversely, owning a network or broadband is that you want the best content on it. If a company was to degrade service, it would be at their own financial peril. And if they did anyway, there are other broadband options, and with more investemnt there are going to be more options not far down the road.
7:29 pm
I’ll believe you when I see the details of what they want to do, and specifically a proposed bill or rule change. Until then I will remain skeptical.
What you describe, Cosmo, sounds like the phone system in the UK. Unlike here, there are no free local calls. You pay for the calls you make, by the minute. So those that use the phone more, pay more – those who use it less, pay less. Here in the US you pay a flat fee for local phone service, and now, with many companies, you pay a flat fee for long distance too, no matter how many calls you make. The flat-fee system is what we have with both ISP’s and web hosting (to a lesser degree). Converting to a pay-by-the byte system, it seems to me, would add a lot of complexity and overhead for companies, and confusion and headaches for users. Flat-fee is the wave of the future. Adding extra fees for premium service is fine.
Anyway, I’ll reserve final judgment to see what the final proposals are.
10:03 pm
Rick, thanks for the shout-out. Appreciate your showing both sides. I would be thrilled if folks took a look at my arguments, but Typepad is down right now! Sorry for the dead link.
Anyway, McCurry was an embarassment on this. He is on the right side of the argument, but his post was incoherent at best. I cringed, and then begged the HuffPo to give me a column to explain it properly. No response yet…
The question is not, do we want the telcos to “block” content. That’s a straw man. Of course they will do everything they can to make money, like any other business.
The only truly progressive (did I just use that term???) and permanent solution to selfish companies is a free market. History is clear on that. Let new entrants come in and serve the customer in a hundred differnet ways.
A highly regulated market prevents new entrants, leaving the remaining players too powerful and also beholden to government. A terrible combination, and exactly what we have here in Cali with our utilities.
I don’t love the telcos. I love the interweb and the people who build it. I think we should have freedom up and down the stack and let the customer make the call.
12:31 pm
I am one of those high usage individuals and I pay thru the nose for it.
I am a daytrader and data feeds direct from all the exchanges and various realtime news feeds I subscribe to.
I have a high end setup here due to the massive amount of data being moved into this house for my servers to crunch over. My ISP offers 3 tiers of service, the highest being 6meg dsl. For my setup I have a Linksys router that combines the seven 6 meg dsl lines I have , yup 42meg in.
My real gripe is that my isp refuses to sell a “naked ” dsl line even for lines beyond the first, so I have to also pay for 7 phone lines! Like I am gonna use all of those phones at once.
7:34 pm
The internet is not the product of the telcos, or of any corporate capitalist entity. It was a very successful government project: pure socialism. Let’s give it its due! Like the Post Office, it aspires to universal, and not just the most profitable, service. “Net neutrality” is the status quo; we can’t draw any conclusions from current service about the “harmlessness” of dispensing with it. The internet has a history of brilliant innovation; the telcos don’t. I think we’d be crazy as citizens to tamper with an overwhelmingly successful distribution model, and give up the only mass medium with a fair and level playing field.