The Net neutrality battle is coming back to Congress and there are real-world reasons why the average Internet user ought to care about the issue.
Net neutrality, essentially, is the principle that users should have unfettered and equal Internet access.
Simple enough. Who would be against that? But when you strip away the half-truths, it becomes another chapter in the battle between telecom behemoths, such as AT&T and Comcast, and online giants such as Google and Amazon.
Both have interests in wanting to shape the Internet’s future, and they may not jibe with your interests.
At issue is whether and how the owners of the Internet “pipes” can manage traffic. The Internet service providers want to manage flow at peak hours, and the online content providers and merchants want no such manipulation of their traffic.
Why should you care? The debate has the potential to determine how fast the Internet works for you, how much you pay and whether you pay an “all you can eat” price or are charged by how much Internet bandwidth you use.
The debate gets more complicated when you realize that certain users, paying a flat rate, are taking up a disproportionately large share of Internet capacity. An example are users of so-called peer-to-peer networks who move a significant amount of music or video via the Internet.
In response, Internet service providers — those who manage the Net’s on-ramps — have been “shaping” Web traffic. They decide who gets to use the Lexus lanes and who is relegated to the slow lane.
That becomes an issue for average users when you’re trying to figure out why it’s taking so long to e-mail photos or download movies.
A bill introduced by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., is a stalking horse, in our opinion, for rules spelling out how service providers are to manage traffic. It would add principles for Internet openness to existing federal communications law. The next logical step would be regulations on the service providers.
That might not seem like a bad thing until you consider how that might affect service pricing and future investment in the Internet.
While they’ve been ascribed nefarious motives, providers have a legitimate need to modulate traffic during peak hours, a problem that’s only going to worsen as Internet use broadens. Certainly, increasing capacity would solve the problem and service providers have, over the years, been busily expanding.
But many argue it’s not enough to keep up. Increasing capacity is an expensive endeavor and providers’ largely flat-rate pricing model encourages bandwidth-intensive use.
As we see it, broadband providers should come up with more sophisticated pricing structures that are more precise than flat rates. If you use more, you should pay more. That would give them the economic incentive to expand infrastructure and refrain from traffic control.
Both service providers and Net neutrality proponents have some valid concerns in this debate.
We think a delicate balancing of the interests is the best course. Congress ought to create a venue for redress if users feel they’ve been unfairly put in the Internet “slow lane.”
But go too far in taking away providers’ ability to shape traffic and tier pricing and you risk removing the economic incentive for capacity expansion.
The evolving nature of the Internet and the potential it has as an economic platform and venue for exchange of ideas must be protected. But it would be foolhardy to tamper too much with the economic structure that has driven its growth.