Net neutrality: long time dead
The idea of a neutral Intranet over which all traffic is treated as equal has been dead for a while. To some degree, anyway.
The debate that’s grabbed the headlines recently has been the noble attempt by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to introduce rules enforcing net neutrality. The FCC went up against powerful lobbies and the result was a somewhat compromised success. Noble turned into nobbled.
The likes of Google and mobile network operators lobbied hard to ensure that mobile networks would remain free of these rules.
And now the US House of Representatives has passed an amendment to an annual funding bill which means that the FCC has no money with which to implement its watered down version of net neutrality.
It was always going to be a hard path for the FCC. Ranged against them are the network operators (and their tame Congress-critters) who don’t like the Government telling them how to run their businesses. They said that the FCC had exceeded its authority in forming rules that would require, for example, operators to reveal how they manage their networks.
Meanwhile, network operators have implemented systems that will be essential to the running of a multi-tier Internet. Clearly, for them net neutrality is a thing of the past. And maybe they have a point.
The debate is most pertinent when it comes to mobile networks. There has been an explosion of data across 3G networks and the operators are struggling to cope. Everyone knew there was going to be a greater use of data, but few predicted the sheer volume, particularly as a result of smartphone and (now) tablet users streaming video.
The network operators are looking at ways of improving backhaul capacity and offloading data via wi-fi and femtocells. But the fact remains that a huge investment is needed to install the infrastructure capable of handling the data loads projected for the next few years.
Who pays for that? Ultimately, of course, it’s the customer. But should all pay the same? If I use my phone only for voice calls, SMS and a bit of email and web browsing, should I be paying the same per-minute as someone who spends the day on Netflix?
Most mobile (and other) network operators have installed the technology to analyse what kind of data each customer is consuming. Given how much data is moved over the web these days, simply monitoring ports and protocols won’t do, so this technology is capable of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to identify the data type. (In the US, where this is a sensitive issue, DPI is sometimes renamed ‘Traffic Policy Management’.) In certain circumstances, it even performs automated Man in the Middle (MitM) operations should the traffic be SSL encrypted.
The whole purpose of this technology is to provide a mechanism by which network operators can bill according to traffic type.
It seems, on the face of it, perfectly reasonable to bill heavy users a higher tariff. And does this really impinge on the more important aspects of net neutrality?
For me, net neutrality is more important to publishers (by which I mean website owners) than consumers. The most dangerous implication of a multi-tier Internet would be the locking-out of smaller publishers. If network operators assigned bandwidth according to your ability to pay for it, it would have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech that the web currently enables. Large publishers, who could pay, would be unaffected while the sites of smaller publishers, activists, hobbyists and average bloggers would become effectively unavailable.
Most of us already pay to use the net, and we pay according to how we access it. You pay more for high-bandwidth broadband than you do for dial-up. Many broadband and most mobile internet providers impose data caps and charge when you go over them. Maybe paying according to type of data could actually result in cheaper deals for those of us who don’t spend hours streaming video.
But when it comes to publishing, the net needs to remain a level playing ground. Otherwise it will become like TV and old-school publishing - the privileged domain of wealthy corporates.
