How Neutral is the Net?

When net neutrality first gained national attention several years ago, the discussion focused on ensuring equality for all sites from the differing internet providers. For example, Google couldn’t pay Comcast to load quicker than Yahoo; nor could the ISPs hold any type of censoring power on the types of sites users chose to frequent.

James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation stated that “Net neutrality… is probably the most talked about and least understood issue I’ve ever come across.” He credited the mystery shrouding the subject to the changing context of the issues with the internet driving the net neutrality debates.

Now, however, the current debate on net neutrality concentrates on the issue of regulation—which the web is virtually free of now— and is driven by two contrasting definitions of the internet: either as a public utility or an innovative industry. Public utilities historically have their prices and practices heavily monitored by the government; innovative industries respond to the control of the free market with minimum government interference. Viewing the internet as a public industry implies openness to heavy government regulation; as a normal industry, the internet is subject to only the dictates of the consumer-driven market.

Other industries have faced the public utility vs. innovative industry debate and have been subjected to heavy government regulation. Comparisons between the internet and the telephone abound among advocates of internet regulation. Gattuso explains,

“A lot of the people that are pushing the net neutrality regulation now are saying that the internet is just a telephone system with pictures, and video, and audio, and live streaming, and everything else you can imagine....

but much of the net is controlled by the usual leftist

I think your comment applies to many web sites.

However, this issue of net neutrality is not about web sites, but about the infrastructure, such as the companies (mostly telephone and cable companies) providing Internet service to peoples homes.

We don't expect our roads, or even our usual shipping companies (the Post Office, FedEx or UPS) to treat a package any differently depending on whether it is a Leftist book, a Conservative book, or a box of blank 3x5 cards.

We don't expect our phone company to treat our calls any differently depending on whether we are calling our conservative uncle, or his leftist wife.

If we were in an active unit in the military on a secret mission, then this would not be the case, and we probably would not be surprised to see our mail, packages and phone calls filtered and censored, if it mattered to our mission.

But the separation of content from infrastructure for small packages and phone calls is pretty obvious and not an issue of controversy for normal civilian use.

Note however that for sufficiently large shipping needs, such as the annual flow of Walmart products from China, or the annual flow of illegal workers from Mexico to the United States, things become very political and "big money talks."

For the Internet, everything is computerized and digitized, and huge video files share the network cables, routers and switches with brief text messages. It is as if the hiking trails, bike paths, secondary roads, interstates, railroads, airports, and worlds largest shipping harbors were all rolled up into one "portal service" that could move a mountain, or a molehill, in the same way, with equal aplomb.

This introduces a problem that we don't have with shipping physical goods, or traditional phone calls, letters or telegrams. The infrastructure needed to reasonably charge for moving huge amounts of data very quickly for some high end users does have to support pay for service rates, charging more for faster delivery or higher bandwidth.

That same infrastructure can be used to delay web pages to your or my PC from freerepublic.com, and or to expedite web pages from moveon.org. Or it can slow bittorrent file sharing (I've seen my Comcast link drop from perhaps a megabit/second to 10 kilobits/second, within a few seconds of firing up a bittorrent to share a perfectly legal Linux kernel source tree --- this does happen.)

With Internet Service Providers (your phone and cable companies providing data services) struggling to get enough networking equipment (Cisco routers and such) installed in communities across the nation to handle the increasing loads, the temptation to use their ability to micromanage which data packets get through more or less quickly and to turn that into revenue streams is overwhelming.

To some extent, it is absolutely the right of Comcast to throttle my Internet connection if say it is loading a page from Google rather than from Yahoo, if Yahoo paid Comcast more licensing fees.

But to some extent, it is absolutely vital that we have an Internet that does loads Moveon.org pages just as well as it loads FreeRepublic.com pages.

Sometimes, it is appropriate for public policy and law to ensure a level playing field for critical infrastructure. But usually, in this day and age, the government is no longer a fair, competent and unbiased enforcer, and enpowering it to ensure a level playing field risks ends up looking more like the "Fairness Doctrine" applied to our AM radio band.

So we have a quandary ... we could use a neutral referee and enforcer of fair handling of at least "ordinary" sized Internet traffic, but we no longer have a government that we trust to be fair or neutral.

Moreover, laws have half lives of decades or centuries, so any law or even regulation with sufficient specificity to actually affect the neutrality of the Internet today would be a dangerous anachronism in another few years. The government just cannot move fast enough to remain relevant.

It is as if the only referee we can find for an NBA finals basketball game is the senile grandmother of Larry Bird (a former Celtic great, who may or may not have a senile grandmother - I have no clue.)

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