A Reprieve for Net Neutrality

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A Reprieve for Net Neutrality

1/18/2007

By Terry Calhoun

There was a time, less than a year ago, when a lot of us thought that the telecommunications dinosaurs were plotting against us. Net neutrality is essentially the status quo, and they wanted to change that. I don't know about you, but I pretty much wake up every morning ecstatic about the development of the Internet and the Web so far. (If we could solve the spam problem, I could drop the "pretty much" part of that statement. And, no, I don't buy that dropping net neutrality would get rid of spam. Not for a second.)

What was it we were afraid of before so much else intervened? Oh, yeah, back before the awakening of the American public to the quagmire in Iraq, back before the 2006 mid-term elections, we were worried that the telecommunications companies were going to get "creative" about selling us services and access in ways that produce little or no benefit to consumers but would escalate both consumer confusion and telecommunications company profits.

As both content providers and content consumers, institutions of higher education, their faculty, staff, and their students definitely have a dog in this fight.

Some background. This quote from a San Francisco Chronicle article summarized the circumstances in 2006 quite nicely:

Network neutrality is the phrase that defines the traditional practice on the Internet in which all traffic is delivered at the same price and level of service. Recent court and regulatory decisions have allowed the phone and cable companies to change that practice by creating preferential delivery deals in which they could charge content creators more for better or faster service. Activists lobbied heavily last year to maintain the traditional "neutrality" of the Internet, creating a national debate on its future.

We were reassured by telecommunications company spokespersons that we had nothing to fear, that they had no intent to create tiered networks that would discriminate, eventually, against smaller content providers. Sure. They said that tiered networks would provide higher speeds for those who could pay extra and that prices for everyone else would go down. Sure.

We figured the opposite, and we were very concerned. We figured that, just like the Bush administration, in hindsight, was intent on invading Iraq the day after 9/11, the telecommunications companies already were working on plans to charge us one price for the bits we used to download a movie, another for the bits we used to download or send e-mail, yet another price for our website browsing, and an even higher price per bit for browsing "premium" websites.

Our fears were strengthened by the enormous arrogance of the advertising campaign the telecommunications companies aimed at consumers; intended to create bias but definitely not to educate. Check out this one from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which is fairly representative of what cable customers got barraged with last summer.