On Net Neutrality
The Internet as you know it is about to change. If you live in the United States and pay for Broadband Internet access, there is a good chance your Internet Service Provider is looking to discriminate against you and what you do on the Internet. Using network management tools and high-tech equipment they watch what you do on the Internet with the intention to block activities and in some cases, selectively slow down things you are doing. In addition, if legislation in the works is passed, you could be charged more based upon what technology you are using or even what content you’re looking at.
When I first started accessing the Internet back in the first half of the 90’s, I had my trusty modem and an account at Cerfnet. At the time, the web was barely in its infancy. It was not the Internet of Google or Yahoo. In fact, the operating system I used at the time didn’t even come with a commercial TCP/IP stack. For the non-geek, that means you couldn’t just connect to the Internet like you could now. I had a commercial “winsock” library that had to be installed before the browser of the time, NCSA Mosiac would run.
While the web was itself a revolutionary concept, it was not the most revolutionary thing about the Internet. For the first time, I was not dialing up a private computer with my modem, I was connecting to a large scale network of interconnected computers. The possibilities were endless. With these interconnected computers you could connect to a “finger server” to see what your friends were up to, play text-based role-playing games called MUD’s, send and receive messages via email, log in to multiple remote systems and much, much more. What was revolutionary about this was unlike the previous paradigm of using a modem to connect to a Bulletin Board System or other single remote system, one was able to do all of these things at one time, independently of each other, to any other systems, all on the same Internet connection. I would imagine everyone takes this for granted these days.
When cable modems started to show up in the mid-nineties, the Internet was about to change. Soon the average consumer would connect to the Internet with speeds and capacity that was once reserved for Internet companies and universities. T1 Internet connections reigned supreme for non-university level corporate connectivity and they were expensive. I was fortunate enough to be in a test rollout for the cable provider in my area who was testing the new Broadband system which boasted T1 level speed. Broadband connectivity would ultimately change how people connect to the Internet and what we would do on it.
There was one problem with the the way Broadband was being rolled out to consumers: math. These companies were rolling out cable modems with speeds that when used in aggregate, exceeded the capacity of the cable company’s connection to the Internet. To use an analogy, they were promising everyone a gallon of water to drink, when they themselves only had a gallon of water. For this to work they bet that not everyone would drink the full gallon, or use all of the connectivity.
This is a model that has proven itself to work well in the telecommunications industry. From corporate telephone systems, all the way to national telecommunications infrastructure, systems are over-subscribed. If everyone decided to use the phone at the same time, the system falls apart. This is one of the main reasons why it’s difficult to make calls during a disaster.
The Internet Service Providers took a known, working model and then something really bad happened. People started using that connectivity. The Internet exploded, websites became bigger. People started streaming video and sharing files. The whole scaffolding that their business model was based upon, selling connectivity that in aggregate exceeds their own capacity, became an issue. To combat the issue, they had to buy more and more expensive connectivity.
The Internet continued to grow. Broadband Internet connectivity started to blur the lines of commercial Internet connectivity with consumer connectivity. Commercial companies purchased connectivity at a premium, not only because they needed more connectivity to service consumers but because there was an expectation that they would use the bandwidth they purchased. Consumers were never expected to use the full capacity of what they were purchasing.
Then file-sharing became a phenomenon that not only concerned the property rights owners but the ISP’s as well. Consumers started leaving computers on 24x7, much in the way a commercial server would be available. These computers were sending files to other consumers at a rate and duration that causes the over-subscription model to falter. It’s important to note that while I’ve mentioned cable companies, big-telco faced these same issues as well.
While all this continued to escalate, technology improved, the Internet became even more bandwidth intensive and consumer connection speeds have continued to increase. My personal Internet connection has 3,555% more capacity than it had 15 years ago. In the commercial space, I pay roughly the the same for 410% more commercial capacity than I did 10 years ago. Yet with all of these technological advances, in essence the Internet Service Providers still have the same problem.
Here comes the nefarious part. How are they trying to solve this problem? By providing consumers with selective access to the Internet, discriminating against applications and services that directly contribute to the over-subscription of their bandwidth. Where at one time, a consumer connection to the Internet could be compared to pipelines of various capacities, ISP’s are now looking to selectively control what their customers have access to and how fast they can access it.
By watching what you do and how you do it on the Internet, ISP’s can selectively throttle or limit what you do. What this means is that while you may be able to download your email at 20Mb/s (a very fast rate), you may be limited to download YouTube videos at 2Mb/s.
In another twist on this subject, ISP’s have proposed charging companies like YouTube to not be rate-limited when going to your home connection. This means that not only are you paying to have 20Mb/s of YouTube in this example, but your ISP is going to charge YouTube to be able to send you data at 20Mb/s even though both you and YouTube already pay to have that much capacity to the Internet. They don’t intend on stopping there. These concepts are so contrarian to what had established the Internet as such a large part of our society and lives.
The freedom to share information is the conceptual cornerstone upon which the Internet was built. We are at the precipice of shift in those freedoms as the consumer facing foundation of the Internet looks to censorship and discrimination in an effort to solve their engineering issues.
There is an urgency with this issue as there is an ongoing national debate which is shaping up to be very partisan. Recently John McCain has introduced legislation to block the FCC from mandating that ISP’s do not selectively discriminate against specific applications, protocols or activity on the Internet. In addition, John McCain’s bill would block FCC rules that would require ISP’s to provide transparency to consumers with regard to network management and congestion management techniques. Senator McCain incorrectly sees Net-Neutrality as a government takeover of the Internet industry as opposed to the government ensuring non-discriminatory access and transparency to the Internet for all consumers and companies.
While I am generally for less government regulation in every aspect of our lives, the Internet is international infrastructure that supports multiple industries and has a direct impact on the global economy. Much like the Interstate Highway System, the phone system and Postal Service, the Internet is much more than the corporations who wish to change the landscape of what users can access and how they can access it.
I highly recommend you find out more about the subject and let your politicians know how you feel about it. The decisions being made today at the Federal level will impact the Internet industry and how we use the Internet for many, many years to come.
