The SaveTheInternet.com coalition launched a campaign this week to support “Net neutrality,” and to oppose legislation in Congress that would allow backbone providers and telcos to give preferential treatment to companies that pay to have their Web sites delivered more quickly on their networks. Peacefire is a charter member of the coalition.
You may have heard about the Net neutrality movement already, or if not, SaveTheInternet.com spells out the core principles: Internet carriers not giving preferential treatment to traffic based on its source or its content (or on whether the content company has paid a “toll” to the network provider). But because it’s not a cut and dried issue like censorship, there is some confusion over why this is important, and some people have raised objections not because they oppose Net neutrality but because it’s not clear why it matters. In particular I want to respond to three arguments: 1) Some people ask, not disingenuously, why is this any different from a company who pays for a T3 getting better deliverability than a company that pays for a T1; 2) Some argue that charging for preferential deliverability is just “the free market at work” and will lead to better goods and services; 3) Libertarians in particular believe that, regardless of the outcome, governments should not regulate contracts except to prevent fraud.
While these would appear to be quite disaparate arguments, I think they’re all facets of the same misconception, and the rebuttal is the same in all cases.
First of all, the reason a T3 costs more than a T1 is because you’re paying for real goods and services – it costs your hosting company more to give you the extra bandwidth. For those services, free market competition and different tiers of services have been very effective at allocating resources to people who want to use them – a $200/month dedicated machine to someone who requires it, a $30/month shared host to someone with smaller needs. On the other hand, if the end users’ ISPs start discriminating between different types of traffic, they can slow down your Web site when their customer Joe Smith tries to load it, and tell you that your Web site will load slowly unless you pay the “fee” to get through their filters. In that case, that’s not a fee for goods and services – Joe Smith already paid their for the service of getting Web pages to him. That’s just a fee that they can charge because if you don’t pay it, Joe Smith won’t know what’s happening – all he’ll see is that your site loads slower.
And that part, “Joe Smith won’t know what’s happening,” is the key to the rebuttal to the second argument – that the “free market” will just naturally lead to better service. In order for the free market theory to work, users have to be able to tell which products and services suck so that they can switch to competitors. But if Joe Smith sees a Web site loading slowly, he usually won’t know that it’s his service provider screwing him, and as a result, is unlikely to switch to another provider. ISPs know this, so they can turn the screws on the content providers to pay up or comply with whatever other demands they want to make.
As for libertarians who argue that the government should not regulate contracts except to prevent fraud – well, I think that if an ISP deliberately slows down some Web sites to make room on their pipeline for others, that is a form of fraud. When you buy an Internet connection, you expect that your ISP will deliver content to you as quickly as possible with the portion of bandwidth that you have paid for. It comes with the understanding that sometimes the network is down and sometimes it’s slow
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but that they’re never, ever going to slow it down *on purpose*! That’s also a response to people who say “Well, the ISP owns the network, they can do what they want” – the ISP owns the network, but if a user is renting a little sliver of it from them, the ISP is obligated to deliver what the user expects when they paid for it.
Lest you think that we’re being paranoid, http://www.savetheinternet.com/=threat has examples of the types of content discrimination that companies have done in the past, including AOL blocking mails that mentioned DearAOL.com, and a Canadian telco blocking their customers from viewing a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union.
To me it all seems very similar to the arguments over Hotmail refusing to un-block our newsletter unless we pay a $2,000 “fee” to Bonded Sender to get whitelisted. It’s not a question of providing a service; they just happen to be sitting on the communications line between us and our users, where they can cut off the communications unless we pay the fee. And it’s also a form of fraud to let people sign up for e-mail addresses thinking that people will be able to send them mail for free, and then turning around charging organizations thousands of dollars to send mail to the addresses on their list. Sadly, this has become the norm for e-mail. For Web traffic, degrading of service and outright blocking by backbone providers (as in the examples listed above on SaveTheInternet.com) is still the exception rather than the norm, and we should do everything to keep it that way.
Do you think the Democratic Party should be allowed to bribe an Internet backbone company to block their subscribers’ access to a Republican fundraising site and make it look like it’s down? Because the only principle on which to oppose that is the principle of Net neutrality.
[tags]telecommunications,net neutrality,savetheinternet.com,peacefire.org,bennett haselton[/tags]