shouting loudly

Why we need net neutrality legislation now

A friend of mine, Todd Wolfson, asked me to write an article on the net neutrality piece for the Philly IMC. This is it. It’s a much shorter take on a law review submission I’m about to send off. If you’d like to see the longer piece, lemme know.

Okay, here goes:

In today’s broadband market, you the end user can download and upload almost any kind of content from any source as fast as the network can transmit it. The major exception, of course, is different pricing for different access speeds. Verizon, for instance, offers two packages in Philadelphia with two different upload/download speeds; one is barely more expensive than dial-up, and the other is twice as expensive but four times as fast. Whichever package you have, everything moves at about the same speed. This also means that you can use whatever online tools you wish, from GNU/Linux to Flickr to BitTorrent. The explosive technological progress empowered by the internet is a direct result of people creating, sharing, and adopting whatever technologies they found the most useful.

This picture of the internet, especially your ability to decide what the internet means to you, is now an endangered species. If Verizon, Comcast, and other broadband companies get their way in Congress this year, your general-purpose broadband connection may soon come to an end.

In addition to tiered access speeds for users, imagine an internet of two or more tiers of access for those who send information. In the fast lane, multinational corporations like Disney, ESPN, and Amazon would pay for the right to blast content down (emphasis on down) your broadband pipe at blazing fast speeds many times faster than what you now enjoy. This will look a great deal like cable television, because those who pay will have something to sell or something to advertise. In the slow lane, by contrast, the already-pokey progress in speed and service would come to a screeching halt. Verizon would inform all online content providers that if they want out of their 3 megabit-per-second ghetto, they have to buy their way out.

Not only is this possible, top executives at several major broadband companies have explicitly stated that it is their business model of the future. The CEO of telecomm giant SBC, Ed Whitacre, stated flatly that companies like Google, Yahoo! and Vonage would soon have to start paying for the privilege of reaching SBC broadband customers. “Cable companies have [broandband pipes]. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them… The internet can’t be free in that sense.” Other companies’ executives have since stated their intention to charge online content providers for the right to reach customers at the fastest speeds.

This would not have worked in the dialup era, because the dialup market was and is highly competitive. Once CompuServe and AOL had a few competitors, nobody was in a position to demand a cut of content providers’ bottom lines. Customers would have quickly and easily switched to another provider that allowed its customers to transmit all data at top speed. Unfortunately, the broadband market is anything but competitive. As Derek Turner explains (pdf), for about half the country’s population, the choice is between one cable modem provider and usually one DSL provider. (The few areas with DSL companies other than the local baby bell are about to lose those already-marginal providers thanks to a recent FCC decision.) About 30% of the population has either cable or DSL, and nearly 20% has neither. Satellite broadband is so slow and expensive as to earn about 1% of the market. So Verizon’s only real competitor is Concast—I mean, Comcast—and vice versa. Pick another town and the names may change, but there will still generally be two or fewer.

Most of the (thankfully common) popular press coverage has framed this as a battle between entrenched business interests; this is certainly a part of picture. Since the broadband market has so little competition, broadband companies can set up online tollbooths as they see fit, and if Yahoo! wants to compete with Google, they’ll pay up. After all, customers gravitate toward faster services. While these companies have PR departments to land quotes in the newspaper, the new model for broadband (Orwellian irony noted) will be more of a travesty for the next Google. The current behemoths will pay grudgingly, but the speed difference will keep most small competitors locked out of future success. Even more tragically, new types of applications will be at a systematic disadvantage. Because they will be new, it will take time for users to adopt them. (For all the hype, consider the less-than-instant adoption of blogs and their multimedia cousins, and blogging is being adopted relatively quickly.) Now imagine the next big online tool, but one that requires next-generation broadband speeds. The company that develops and funds this technology would have to pay hefty fees to regional broadband providers while convincing users to adopt it quickly enough to justify the company’s broadband fees. Few startups could plunk down the capital to make it through this torture test, and many valuable inventions would be sent abroad or buried. Many more would just never be developed.

Even more tragically, consider the impact on the not-for-profit world. Countless programmers, educators, citizen-journalists, and nonprofits have made new and innovative uses of the internet with no hope of profit. Free/Libre/Open Source Software, Wikipedia, and Indymedia are just three of the countless examples of collaborative online tools that have been developed because the developers believe they are good for society, not good for paying the mortgage. Offline nonprofit organizations also use the internet to improve the world in ways they have done for decades. Organizations that promote healthy living put wide arrays of objective information on their websites. Universities and scholars are increasingly putting teaching tools and scholarship online for all to access freely. Federal, state, and local government are bringing e-government to life. None of these groups can be expected to foot the bill for fast downloads, and none deserves to be stuck in the slow lane, held hostage to AT&T’s bottom line.

Finally, consider the very real potential for internet censorship on the part of broadband service providers. In July 2005, Telus, the second largest telecommunications company in Canada, was fighting a strike by the Telecommunications Workers Union. Telus blocked its 1 million customers from accessing a website that supported the strikers. While such censorship is fortunately sparse, US law guarantees that ISPs face no civil liability for even willful acts of censorship and most or all reserve the right to block any content for any reason. Without a network neutrality mandate, Verizon could do more than stick a union website in the slow lane; they could cut it off entirely.

Call your Senators and Representative today. Tell them you want a network neutrality mandate in any new telecommunications law. Tell them to prevent broadband providers from deciding what you can do with your internet. You can find their phone numbers at Senate.gov and House.gov, respectively. For now, at least, those websites will download as fast as your internet connection allows.