Your Guide to Net Neutrality

Suppose you open up video-sharing Web site YouTube one day to search for "political parodies" and the results take you to the dreaded 404 Not Found error page. Perhaps YouTube is just having some technical difficulties. But consider this once unimaginable scenario: it's because politicians paid your Internet Service Provider a hefty fee to block that type of content from ever reaching you, the potential constituent.

We, as Internet users, assume that we can go online to see whatever we want whenever we want. We take these rights for granted, upheld through our inherent rights of freedom of speech and invasion of privacy. We'd like to hope that our constitution protects us from having our Internet rights violated, but the aforementioned scenario may not be so far off in the distant future as we'd like to hope. Telecommunications corporations nationwide are pushing to obtain legislation that would allow them to control content of the Internet. This situation has many potentially invasive scenarios. It would allow telecommunication companies to create a "fast lane" on the Internet, so that those with deep pockets can buy faster loading times for their sites. As for those who can't afford to be in the fast lane, their sites would retain slow loading speeds. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) could also control which sites Internet viewers can access based on which companies pay them the most money.

Inherently, this seems wrong. As Internet users, we feel as though this should be illegal, and that is because of a little thing known as Net Neutrality (or "Network Neutrality"). Even if most have never heard the term, they've likely experienced it and understand it to be true. Net Neutrality is the notion that all Web sites are treated equally in loading speeds, and that all users have equal access to all content and applications on the Web. In most basic terms, Net Neutrality means that the Internet is non-discriminant. As Sara Baase, author of a book about social, legal and ethical issues on the Internet explains, Net Neutrality means "charging all customers the same rate for sending information over the Internet and not giving priority to any particular content or customer." Although never officially written into law, the inherent value of Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from speeding up or slowing down Web sites based on their content, source, ownership or destination.

Recently, telecommunications enterprises have sought to do away with Net Neutrality and prevent it from ever being written into law. They believe it's unfair that multi-million dollar industries can be making so much money by using Internet providers' wires for free. Ed Whitacre, Chief Executive Officer of telecom company SBC Global is best- known for this complaint. He told BusinessWeek in 2006:

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.

Although he argues that he would never interfere with what users can see and can't see, he and other telecom giants refuse to allow non-interference laws to be put into place, which is our first hint that their intentions are dishonest. As Peter Phillips, author of Project Censored, a book about the biggest issues of 2007 that got little to no media attention, predicts, Internet access could very soon be based on a "pay as you search" or "pay as you post" basis. To prevent this from happening, Congress must write the long-known, yet unspoken rule of Net Neutrality into law to keep major telecommunications corporations from discriminating against what users see and do on the Internet.

Opponents imply that adopting Net Neutrality into law would mean writing new government regulations that will be burdensome for Internet users. But the concept has always been around, even if it was never officially written anywhere. Forty years ago, the FCC decided that the companies providing communications services would not be allowed to interfere with or discriminate against information services.

Another example of a precedent of Network Neutrality was when the federal court broke up Ma Bell, a major telephone company in 1982. The court required the company to provide "nondiscriminatory interconnection" and access to their networks. The Internet should be treated the same way as other forms of communication have always been treated historically.

SBC wants to control what their customers do and see on the Internet, but why is that any different than the telephone? SBC doesn't, and I hope would never even think of, control who their customers call or what they say. When it comes to television, cable companies don't control which channels a customer can change or when certain shows can be watched. SBC and other telecommunications companies should have consistent policy throughout their communication industries, whether it is the phone, Internet, or television.

Although many founders of the Internet are pro-neutrality, there is one who is not. Robert Kahn, who invented the Transmission Control Protocol that allows data to be sent through the Internet, expressed his resentment toward Net Neutrality at a seminar at the Computer History Museum in 2007. He said he was entirely opposed to "mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net."

His statement implies that enforcing Net Neutrality means that innovation on the Web would be hindered. But Kahn is strongly mistaken. Passing legislation for neutrality would have the opposite effect; it would allow innovation to flourish, rather than to be stalled. Take Internet search engine Google, for example.

Two college kids, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the entire industry from their Stanford dorm room. Popular user-submitted video Web site YouTube was created in a makeshift office in a garage and has revolutionized the way we communicate. In June 2007, YouTube was used as a device for common people across the nation to ask questions to 2008 presidential candidates during political debates. It was the first time the general public had direct involvement in the debates.

Other multi-million dollar sites like Ebay, Facebook and Myspace that didn't exist three years ago were created by common folk and have gone on to change the way we live our lives. It is because of the openness and freedom of the Internet that this was possible; all sites are treated equally in loading speeds and availability because this is the nature of the Web. Because all sites have a level playing field, opportunity for small, start-up sites to become hits is plausible, and in fact a usual occurrence.

What about the next generation of Googles and Ebays? Steve Krug, a Web designer who has improved interfaces for Apple, AOL and Netscape wrote in his Web usability book that the slower a page loads, the less likely a user is to ever return. In reference to Web loading speeds, Krug wrote, "What's the fun of flying if you can only go a few miles per hour?"

Representative Bobby Rush, an Illinois Democrat against Net Neutrality told an audience in 2006 to not be confused by "spurious complaints" about Net Neutrality. He said that Net Neutrality is a "solution in search of a problem."

The implication behind Rush's mindset and those who agree with him is that supporters of Net Neutrality are just imagining a hypothetical scenario where cable conglomerates will discriminate. Cable companies agree with Rush and say that they don't intend to discriminate.

This is misleading.

Many conglomerates have already expressed their intention to abuse their power for profit without Net Neutrality laws. William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet Service Provider such as his firm should be able to charge Yahoo for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google's search engine. But Smith isn't alone. SBC's CEO Ed Whitacre and Verizon's CEO Ivan Seidenberg have expressed identical sentiments to the New York Times. Verizon's Ivan Seidenberg told an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, "We have to make sure they don't sit on our network and chew up our capacity. We need to pay for the pipe.".

Whitacre, who is one of the most vocal characters against Net Neutrality, constantly refers to phone wires as "his pipes," claiming that the Internet uses those wires and is therefore essentially his property. He's not alone in arguing that it's unfair that companies like Google and Microsoft are making millions each year by using his wires for free.

But what Whitacre forgets to mention is that those telephone wires aren't his at all; on the contrary, they are public property and he is using them for free. Daniel Berninger, a Washington, DC-based independent technology analyst wrote in 2006 that SBC and other telecom companies typically own only two percent of the land they use for "their" wires to deliver their product to consumers.

The other 98 percent is granted to them for free use because phone companies are permitted to use the public rights-of-way. This is allowed because telecommunication companies are, in theory, delivering a public service. By this logic, aren't phone companies doing same thing with public land that they are saying Internet providers do with "their" wires? This is hypocrisy at its finest. If we're going to charge net users to use ISP pipes, we should charge phone companies 98 percent more than what they pay now to use public land to route their product.

Sure, it's true that maybe there are some honest cable companies out there. That's why it's argued that if customers don't like the way the "fast lane" runs under certain providers, then those customers can simply switch companies to other service providers. But for most users, that's simply not true.

Although there is not a nationwide monopoly on cable companies, the availability of service providers on a local level is limited and monopolized. According to a study released by the Government Accountability Office in 2004, cable subscribers in only 2 percent of all markets have the opportunity to choose between two or more wire-based operators.

This statistic shows that customers don't have any options when it comes to their Internet providers. They're stuck with what they get, and if telecom industries choose to discriminate, vulnerable customers are forced to suffer the consequences.

As recent as June 4, 2008, leading Internet provider Comcast started protecting its network from what it describes as "congestion" caused by a handful of customers who use far more bandwidth than everyone else. The New York Times reported that the company is doing this by slowing down the Internet connections of heavy users, especially those using file-share Web site Bit Torrent.

Perhaps even more frightening than the fact that Comcast is targeting users of a specific site is the fact that unless users are obsessive readers of the New York Times' breaking news technology blog, they probably will never know this is happening right beneath their noses. With Comcast's decision, we're starting to see the first signs of a ruthless cyber world where select cable companies have control.

Because of the versatility and innovation that come hand-in-hand with the Web, it's hard to predict what new thing will come out next. We probably wouldn't have ever predicted social networking or YouTube video-sharing would ever exist. But without Net Neutrality to preserve innovation on the Internet, perhaps we'll never know what great things could have been.