Monsters in Your Living Room

As you can see from the video above, the Net Neutrality debate is nothing we haven't encountered before.  As you may be able to tell from the style of the video, the "paid" vs "free" tv debate was more an issue of the 70's, but remains in discussion today.  For the most part, the free vs paid debate was settled on ambiguous grounds, permitting providers the ability to charge customers for additional channels, but requiring they broadcast a handful a free basic channels to antennae and cable customers.  The PBS we know today was largely borne from this issue, but has recently found itself threatened by closure.

"Pay TV" has survived and flourished despite the prevalence of "free TV" by innovating and pacing with competitors.  Digital cable and satellite service providers are the most pervasive forms of pay TV, but recently, internet TV has stormed onto the market with Hulu and Netflix.  Digital cable, satellite television, and internet television are all innovations as a results of competition.  Once DirectTV began encroaching on the market majority with satellite television, Comcast, then AT&T, developed digital cable as a way of delivering hundreds of channels in order to compete.  

The kind of regulation enacted upon the television industry didn't stifle progress, it ensured it.  Net Neutrality, like free vs paid television, ensures that there is always room for a competitor, without penalizing market leaders.  Without Net Neutrality, Comcast could stifle, or even altogether block, internet access to the websites of companies which compete with any of the hundreds of products under the NBC-Comcast umbrella, resulting in a sort of monopoly.  Under Net Neutrality, however, Comcast, or any other Internet service provider, would be denied to the right to tamper with what data is sent and received on their networks, thus ensuring fair competition for companies.  We know this system would work, because it already has.  For example, NBC is owned by cable TV provider Comcast, but thanks to regulation, Comcast is forbidden from throttling or delaying any specific signals and NBC comes through as clear as any other network.  As a result, we have a varied and, often, engaging world of television, with some exceptions.

With the Flick of a Switch

The revolution in Egypt recently pushed the issue of Internet control into public debate.  As the population in Egypt began to organize and protest, the government, run by Hosni Mubarak, sought to stifle the massive uprising by eliminating the ability of the protesters to communicate and organize by disabling all Internet and cell phone service.  Almost simultaneously, the United States Congress reviewed a legislative proposal giving the president that very same control over US online activity.  The proposal was dismissed in December, but reintroduced in early February.

While the legislation may be, as suggested, an emergency control to shut down "the system that controls the floodgates at the Hoover Dam", it can not be ignored that this control would allow the government the ability to effectively disable the Internet the same way that Mubarak so recently did.  

In his article on the legislative push, PC Magazine writer John C. Dvorak, highlights how many supporters of the bill, such as Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, know very little about the Internet and United States network infrastructure.  The Internet could never be attacked as a whole and the days of e-mail worms are over,  let alone the floodgates of the Hoover Dam opened from a remote location.  Misinformation is the battle being fought, and the greatest weapon against it is the Internet itself.

A Tip of the Cap

Recently, the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission, the equivalent of our FCC, agreed on "Usage-Based Billing" for the company Bell Canada.  The drastic move reduced the monthly usage bandwidth from 200GB down to a mere 25GB per month.  The move was met with an appropriate eruption of resistance from the oft complacent Internet community.

Perhaps Bell Canada merely applied too much pressure in too short a time.  200GB - 25GB a month is a massive and alarming leap and was met with the outpour it warranted.  Comcast, however, seems to have a more accurate read on the temerity of its consumer base.  Rather than trying to slam a lid on alloted bandwidth, Comcast used some reasonable and devious foresight in their approach.  Knowing that with a delicate touch, and enough time for fervor to come and go, Comcast has implemented a somewhat reasonable usage cap and will charge those who will most certainly exceed it in the near future as the inevitable growth of data strains their bandwidth.

From Comcast.com:
"Your Comcast High-Speed Internet service has a monthly data usage allowance of 250 gigabytes (GB). If you are wondering whether you are at risk of exceeding this 250GB threshold, you should know that the vast majority - around 99% - of Comcast customers use significantly less than 250GB per month."


Certainly, a cap of 250GB will seem irrelevant to the typical Internet user when framed with statistics like "50 million plain text e-mails" and "25,000 songs", but when you consider things like high definition streaming video, online games, and entire families sharing that cap, the ceiling starts to look that much closer.  However, perhaps the most important thing to remember when considering the effects of metered Internet remains "growth".  With services like Netflix and Youtube expanding rapidly and the evolution of cleaner and clearer video and audio codecs, Comcast's 250GB cap will soon be an absurd limitation on Internet usage.