Working in online advertising has familiarized me with some of the larger issues that affect our industry and, ultimately, the way we use the Internet. Not the least of which is the subject of net neutrality that’s been in the news lately. It caught my attention, so I started researching and discovered a startling realization: Our representatives in Congress are hard at work deciding the future of the Internet. We don’t have much of a say in it. But our phone companies probably do.
Our government on Capitol Hill has been busy with numerous bills addressing our interactive status quo known as "net neutrality”. I see net neutrality as an important cog in a machine that keeps the Internet boundless, freely accessible and undivided. More specifically, net neutrality refers to the unfettered, taxed or tolled transmission of information over the various telecommunication networks that comprise the physical makeup of the Internet. Unfortunately, it seems that the Internet’s renewed potential as an avenue for additional revenue for big telecoms has these entities opening their wallets and lobbying like the skilled pros they are.
Physically speaking the Internet is a mass of wiring owned by the guys you buy your services from: Cable, satellite, telephone and cellular providers. Guess what? They want to charge either you or your content providers for the speed at which content moves. In other words, if you want a fast download, it’ll cost you. (Or will it cost Microsoft?) It’s Internet apartheid, basically, that would discriminate against those who don’t cough it up. If these providers have their way, the Internet will radically change because they will have the right to charge for carrying ‘freight’ across their property. You and I will ultimately be passed this cost.
Our side, “our” being anyone who enjoys broadband without extra cost, is not without corporate proponents. Major content providers like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, and Amazon.com have been pleading with Congress to adopt laws to protect net neutrality, to “save” the Internet. Playing superman for the Internet is nice, but they are protecting the existing business models that have been serving them so well.
On the corporate battlefield, though, companies like AT&T and Verizon feel the Googles and eBays are getting free rides off of the back of telecoms. Collecting money from broadband subscriptions isn’t satisfying the telecom executives; they see Google’s astronomical run in the stock market and want some that success for themselves. Burdening the content providers, of course, could be a financial disaster for many of the blue chip tech companies that have barely managed to evolve in the current structure of the Internet. We’d see a multi-tiered pay-to-play Internet. It seems unthinkable in 2006.
Personally, I think Al Gore could have implemented a 2-tiered Internet when he was invented it, you know, 10 years ago before anyone knew what it was. We just would have accepted it. But the Internet landscape would be plenty different. Many of today’s innovative companies that started out as guppies would never have been able to mature had they had to pay for the content to be delivered to their web customers/visitors. The Internet would likely have become a much less dynamic engine of commerce with free speech and expression relegated to a few public access-like channels. Boring.
There is more at stake than corporate profits. According to the Savetheinternet.com Coalition, the Internet is a “crucial engine for economic growth and free speech”. This coalition’s aim is to represent the Americans from all walks of life and to ensure Congress doesn’t pass a telecommunications act without the presence of meaningful Network Neutrality protections.
Just this week, a bill to establish a permanence to net neutrality was shot down in Washington. The only ones to benefit are telecoms (and some lobbyists). This does not mean that the fight is over. Years of hard fought compromise and favors need to be called in to create a series of bills to ensure our Internet stays as accessible and beneficial as it’s been the past 15 years. Hopefully, the little guy will be able to live with what turns out.
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