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.

Look Familiar?

AOL and Friendster for free!

This image is merely speculation, but it is not difficult to imagine a future of packaged Internet subscriptions given that this is how television is already sold. However, a system of subscription for the internet would stifle the internet's freedom of information and interactivity, smother the future of legitimate journalism, and severely impact subscription services like Netflix, LexusNexus, and The New York Times, adding an additional ISP "subscription" on top of their own.

You may not even know it, but over the last few years your Internet subscription has already begun to tighten.  For example, recently in the US, Comcast has put into place a 250 Gigabyte (GB) per month "cap" on the bandwidth of its Internet subscribers.  Now, 250GB may sound like a reasonable ceiling for monthly usage, but this all depends on how you use your bandwidth.

Let's assume you love film and subscribe to the Netflix Instant Watch program, allowing you to stream movies and television shows to your PC.  Streaming Netflix in high definition uses approximately 2GB/hr, so if you watch an average of 10 2-hour films a month, you've already consumed 40GB of your 250GB limit.  Now let's assume you love video games.  The Steam service offered by Valve Software allows users to buy and download games directly from their servers.  The size of many of the games on Steam tend to fall around 10GB each.  Assuming you play 5 new games a month, you are eating 50GB of your 250GB limit.  Finally, let's assume you're very proud to gift these services to your nephews for Christmas in 2010.  If they use their services conservatively, they consume around 100GB of their family's 250GB cap.  Bandwidth caps are the Internet's equivalent of debit card overdraft fees, which were recently banned by the Federal Reserve, deceptively charging customers for unannounced and poorly outlined use violations.

However, despite all this, the greatest problem with Internet bandwidth caps is presented by the rapid growth of data.  Ten years ago, you likely would have had to Google "Terabyte" for any real scope of how much data a terabyte contained, but today, you might own a harddrive with a 3 or 4TB capacity.

Welcome

"[…] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

- Senator Ted Stevens

You're doing it right now.  Look at you go.  You're using The Internet as it was intended to be used.  A sprawling, free, open network of computers, the Internet has likely allowed you and millions of others to learn things in minutes that would have taken hours or even days just twenty years ago.  Chances are good you've already checked your Facebook today.  You can even use a computer or mobile device to interface via live video with another Internet user anywhere else on Earth for as long as you like.  The Internet has allowed for the exponential growth curve of technology to take off and we are right on the bleeding edge.  It is an undeniably fascinating time to live.  Whether you realize it or not, you are tapping the free information of the Internet this very moment, but, unfortunately, some Internet service providers and government bodies seek to stifle that freedom and availability of information allowed us by the Internet.

Net Neutrality is a priciple, a policy, and a movement.  Since early 2000, Internet users and researchers have identified the potential for the Internet to go the way of radio and television and suffer heavy regulation.  In the coming weeks, I will be expanding upon and examining the current state of Net Neutrality and the freedom of The Internet.