Net neutrality debate about ensuring a level playing field

The US Federal Communications Commission’s historic vote to preserve net neutrality last week was the right move, even if its full impact can not be immediately understood.

The vote may not even be a sure thing. The FCC move is likely be challenged in court, as happened the last time it tried to adjudicate on this topic.

As the international debate about it has shown, net neutrality is a complex issue, making it impossible to know precisely how the FCC’s vote will play out over time. But boiled down into a basic explanation, it has been likened to keeping the roads of the internet open equally to all traffic, without tolls being charged for faster, express lanes that would give preference to those who can afford it.

In other words, if you use Google to make a search, as millions do every day (when I checked internetlivestats.com on Monday evening, people around the world were making 47,803 Google searches per second), Google cannot be charged extra for using considerably more bandwidth on the internet to provide search results than, say, a startup in Athlone offering a streaming music app.

Infrastructure pressure

That might seem wrong. After all, if Google – or

Netflix

, or

Facebook

, or other pro-neutrality allies – use a lot of bandwidth, which puts pressure on internet infrastructure, why shouldn’t they be charged for it?

Or, if a company simply wants to pay for a fast lane to get a competitive boost – say, if Yahoo pays a network provider to have Yahoo Mail traffic prioritised over Gmail traffic – shouldn’t they have that right?

Some people do think that's all fine. That's why the vote was contentious, and lobbying has been heavy on both sides, becoming on the business side, a face-off between the big US internet service providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, and internet companies of all shapes and sizes.

But flip the example above around, and the benefits of the FCC vote, and a net neutrality policy, are clearer. With net neutrality, a startup will not be forced into a slower lane to deliver that streaming service – and hence, out of business – simply because Google can pay for a fast lane and a small company cannot.

And, with net neutrality, Yahoo – as now – has to compete on the design, features and efficiency of its mail offering.

The FCC last Thursday chose to approve an approach that would view the internet as a utility, subject to regulation, restricted on the ways it can change how it delivers net connectivity.

This is a win for smaller businesses, entrepreneurship, innovation and ordinary internet users. Yes, the big internet companies that lobbied hard will be pleased, too. But the FCC vote means that any individual or company with an idea for an internet service will not have their ideas constrained by an ability to pay upfront for bandwidth.

Nor will a fast-growing startup find it will not be able to scale up in size simply because it cannot afford fast-lane internet tolls that increase as it adds users.

Nor will the existing, deep-pocketed companies by default end up the main gatekeepers for new services, simply because they can afford to offer them, tying consumers and business customers ever more closely in to a few big firms.

Imagine if Google had faced a two-tier internet when still a small project at Stanford. If it had, it would likely have either been bought early on at low value (perhaps just to be suppressed, as often happens), or lost out to big competitors at the time such as AltaVista.

You don’t really remember AltaVista? Well, exactly. A better algorithm and business got an opportunity because the internet was a fairly level playing field.

The next challengers to today’s star internet services will also come about because that playing field has been preserved.

Opponents to net neutrality argue that government involvement in the internet means the whole shebang is going to get irretrievably messed up. Consumers will end up spending more for internet access as operators are forced to add infrastructure and cannot recover this from business tolls.

Developing antidote

This seems highly unlikely. Such a perspective ignores the inconvenient fact that the internet was a US government project in the first place. That aside, the free market, and the growth in mobile internet access, and a nascent movement by some communities to build out their own networks, and some exemplar cities having ultrafast networks provided by Google, would seem a likely, continuously developing antidote to increased consumer charges.

If this proves not to be the case, it is hard to imagine that the FCC would not then take other steps.

Of course, a court could overturn the FCC vote. If that happens, we’ll have a two-tier internet, but at global scale.

That’s because, while the US might opt for those fast and slow national lanes, the EU already has indicated it will not, and will preserve net neutrality. If that’s the eventual outcome, how will the differences play out internationally? Between the US and EU, there would be two contrasting, differently-weighted, vast markets for internet services, businesses and especially, startups. Things could get very interesting.