Network Neutrality

Another story out of Snopes.com (among others, but most people I know trust Snopes, so I'll include their link) and others involves a debate going on in Congress as to whether the concept of Internet "Network Neutrality" should be codified in law.

This is vitally important legislation for anyone who is reading this and everyone else who uses the Internet.

The basic idea of Network Neutrality is that networked computers (like the Internet) work on the basis of "packets" of data, and no packet is given priority over other packets. Thus, if I choose to jump on the internet to go check out Sprint.com, the parts of the Internet which pass through AT&T's hardware (using bandwidth for which AT&T has been paid) are not given lower priority in order to discourage people from checking out an AT&T competitor.

That's somewhat of a simplification, but that's basically what it boils down to. If such legislation is not passed, there are several expected results.

First, a number of Voice over Internet (VoIP) services such as Vonage are expected to suddenly find that their internet traffic no longer travels quickly enough to make for usable real-time conversations. This is because large portions of Internet traffic travel through the hardware and equipment of the large telecom companies, who don't particularly like the competition.

Second, some large companies have already started talking about charging a fee to users for priority handling of their information packets. But here's the key: They're not talking about charging this fee to you and me, we're already paying for our Internet access. No, they're talking about charging this fee to the people on the other end of our communications.

Imagine it this way: Suppose you picked up your telephone to call someone in another state (someone who lives in a region served by a different primary telephone company), and you found that you could no longer connect to that person, or could only connect at traditionally low-usage hours of the day, because the person at the other end of the call hadn't paid a fee to your telephone company for priority handling of their calls.

That's very much akin to what has already been proposed on a limited basis by AOL and Yahoo with regard to e-mail: If Network Neutrality is not made law, AOL and Yahoo have announced plans to offer "priority handling" of e-mails from companies who have paid a fee to AOL and Yahoo. That means if you have an AOL or Yahoo e-mail address, mail addressed to you may be artificially delayed if it comes from a source that was unwilling to pay AOL or Yahoo for priority handling. In spite of the implications of the name "priority handling", this is in fact an artificial slow down of everyone else. Sort of like how USPS mail suddenly started taking longer once next-day or second-day service started costing more, or how FedEx or UPS ground shipment virtually always takes about a week, whether the box was shipped from across the globe or just across town.

It's just a matter of time before the Telcos decide to do something similar, trying to charge a fee for "priority handling" of packets passing through their equipment, attempting to extort additional money from the people on the other end of the line.

Worse than that, suppose some owner of a part of the Internet infrastructure decides to strongly support one party over the other. Just for the sake of argument, suppose AT&T were to be strongly liberal in philosphy, and were to decide to slow down access to FoxNews.com and Free Republic.com and prioritize traffic to HuffingtonPost.com and MoveOn.org. How slow do you have to make some sites before the majority of people won't bother to wait? Do you really want your access to information filtered so that you can only get reasonable speeds when you're accessing the information your ISP wants you to have?

Network Neutrality has never been a law before, but it has been the unspoken rule of the Internet. Telecom companies and major Internet service providers are trying to change that. We can't let them.

Please, call your Senators and Representatives. Write to them. Write letters to the editor. Don't let the face of the Internet as we've all come to know and love it be so radically changed for the worse.

Liam.