Ranting on Net Neutrality

Warning: Proselytizing rant on net neutrality ahead. There's no personal news.

Disclosure: I have always been a very hard line believer in open source, open protocols and open standards. I'm generally anti-corporation (remember I quit USAA for their behavior as a corporation). So everything I say will be biased by my personal beliefs. However, that doesn't have to mean I'm wrong ;)

I'm not typically comfortable stumping for a cause or trying to convert people b/c I try hard to leave people as they are. On the other hand, this time, I care more than usual about it so I was wondering what I could do to help people understand net neutrality and what's at stake. The answer I was consistently given was spread awareness. This is my attempt to do just that.

Net neutrality is a very simple concept - but it's also easily distorted. Let's say that I can connect to the internet at a certain speed (probably b/c I pay someone to allow me access) and you can connect to the internet at that speed or higher. Then net neutrality is the guarantee that you and I can communicate at that speed. There is no magic required to ensure this guarantee because it is the natural state of connectivity. To slow down that speed (based on what you send me - say a video for example) would have to be engineered on purpose.

First I want to try to explain "the industries" arguments. By industries I do of course sarcastically refer to companies like AT&T. I want to then try to break down what I think is wrong with them and what I think the logical consequences of their ideas are.

It's become rather famous in internet circles that a certain member of congress defined the internet as a series of tubes like your kitchen plumbing. He stated that you can't just pull up to the tubes with a dump truck and dump everything in there at once b/c you ... clog it up. He went on to portray AT&T as the savior of the internet by providing access to "highways" on which special kinds of traffic could travel - approved "premium" content. Well there is no response to this argument. There is no response to it because its a big, stupid, ignorant lie. It is obvious this particular congressman knows nothing about the technical world we live in. The internet is not a series of tubes. You can't pull a dump truck up to and throw the world into the tubes to clog it up. That's because they aren't tubes. Your connection is a copper wire and you can't "fill" it. That doesn't have a real-world meaning. The internet self-controls congestion and the basic economic principles of scarcity (i.e. unavailability due to wait times)causes humans to naturally govern their usage. This hasn't had to happen yet. The reasons why are a little technical but I'll do my best to simplify them. What AT&T has paid this representative to imply is that their capacity for transmitting data is nearing capacity and they want you to believe that the internet is in the beginning of a saturation in which no information will be able to get in or out. This so far hasn't come CLOSE to reality. There is beginning to be a limit to the number of machines that we can continue to connect, but this is already a solved problem and has nothing to do with the amount of data currently being transmitted. I want to tell you more about your connectivity and the speeds you SHOULD be getting, but that is for a later paragraph regarding who owns these "tubes" and who paid for this "tubes". Just understand from this paragraph that neutrality means someone can not artificially slow down your connection and that it is mathematically provable that capacity is not yet close to reachable. I'm not completely satisfied with this answer b/c I haven't offered you any proof. I'm asking you to trust me on this one or better yet, research it yourself while being extremely careful about the source if your information.

I read a recent article that said to ensure that certain kinds of traffic cannot be slowed down would grant special privilege to that kind of content (let's continue to assume we mean video b/c videos are large compared to text). That might superficially sound plausible until you realize the big joke is that if you artificially slow down content, it's the fast content that has had an advantage conferred upon it. In this case the truth is exactly the opposite of the claim.

Media companies like TWC and AT&T are interested in controlling content and in this sense the battle for net neutrality is very much like the war being waged against bad intellectual property rights (copyright, patents, ownership etc) concerning software. A non-neutral internet could easily become a lot like cable TV for example. You can connect by ordering specific grouping of internet content. Think of it like this: maybe you want to order the social content package from TWC. This consists of email, myspace, facebook and maybe some chat forums. To get access to technical articles or news, you would have to additionally order other kinds of content. Not only are you paying for the content, but the providers of the content have to pay to be hosted. That's a lot like writing a text message on your phone and both the sender and receiver get charged. Let's call this the managed content model.

I want to make the argument against managed content on the internet as the basis for why net neutrality is important. Historically information mediums begin as a two way process. Provider and reader are interacting. Published print and radio are fine examples of something which began as a two way medium, became commercialized and turned into managed content and then became a one way medium in which only the provider has a say in what is published. My argument is that this minimalization of feedback degrades the quality of content. It provides no safeguards or fact checking of information and it leaves the "common man" out of the information loop. The laws are setup to achieve this goal (not as a conspiracy but b/c it makes money). The FCC is the perfect example of this. They split the radio spectrum largely b/w cbs and nbc. They became responsible for 97% of the radio content. Wonder what that would be like? It becomes a propaganda outlet for the owners (think FOX News and Rupert Murdoch as an example). I'm not going to explain the details of why I think information feedback loops are critically important because I think it speaks for itself. However by means of example, without the feedback loop and two way communication, the study of science could not progress.

Another argument the big media companies love to present is that it's THEIR "tubes" and they have an inherent RIGHT to mandate it's rules. This is completely misrepresenting "the tubes". The phone and cable companies were given incredible amounts of money to make sure United States homes would be connected by fiber (incredibly fast compared to your current copper wire connection) by sometime 2 years ago. They idea is that they were allowed to drastically overcharge you (500% in some cases) and not pay taxes on this overcharge if they would agree to spend it upgrading your "tubes". Guess what? They never upgraded them. The bottom line here though is that we paid for them ourselves with what is essentially a tax bailout. They didn't deliver their end of the bargain and yet the tubes are still theirs. This falls horribly wrong for another reason. The media companies never created the content themselves. They never created any browsing software, any information, any viewing mechanism etc. What they provided was a series of wires to connect the good stuff together.

So get this...
This means that under a managed media plan, you pay, your content provider pays and then you pay again through taxes. The phone and cable companies collect all three of these payments...tax free.

There is another reason they wanted managed content. I mentioned earlier that net neutrality has a lot in common with IP law. The major push against neutrality by the media corporations is that they can contain software piracy and a lock on a market. This is a big topic by itself and would be the subject of many posts. Basically however, it means something like this: I want to download your music or video game with a popular transfer protocol called P2P. TWC might recognize it and because someone else might use it to pirate data, slow the speed down to such a degree that it would takes many months to download it where as it could have taken minutes before hand. By the way, Comcast is already doing this.

In a nutshell I am advocating net neutrality based on rejecting the media companies claim to own the data and the "tubes". I'm advocating it b/c I believe managed content models are a very serious threat to the information we can send back and forth to each other and I'm advocating it b/c of the critical importance of two way communication.

So this was long and boring I know but what can you do? I can talk more about any of the topics given though I doubt anyone wants me to ;) I just wanted to spread some awareness around and warn people not to take their cues on technology from 70 year old congressmen who still use rotary phones and think a web site is some kind of new fangled construction site.

Ross