This presumptuous title just came into my mind after reading over a few articles over the ol’ net. This may be obvious to some, but looking at some current headlines in the IT world, I can just feel something brewing; something might change the way we use the internet, in a big way.

The problem, briefly

What I’m talking about is the current controversy around net neutrality(NN). Although the repercussions were easy to see in retrospect, the need for the regulation of the flow of information over the internet is something that hit me in the head. It all makes sense! The gist of the problem is that one camp says there should be discrimination (which I will discuss later) over what kind of data flows over the internet, and the other camp that says that everything should be considered the same (hence the ‘neutral’ in net neutrality).

The current situation

The fathers of the Internet (by fathers I do not mean just Tim Berners-Lee, who btw is for NN, but rather everyone that contributed to make the net what it is today) never in any document discussed the issue. It has been assumed that the Internet was neutral up until now. Arguably, that is what has made the Internet what it is today:

1. Non-discrimination: Every bit is equal.
2. Interconnection: It is required for operators to connect to each other in many accessible points.
3. Access: Anything on the network may connect to anything else on the network.

Although those rules are not observed in all cases (how about firewalls, and how about traffic shaping?), these are the broad guidelines which depict the big picture of the internet. On a macro scale, it is all about those 3 rules. This is the internet we know and love. Without those, there would not have been as much innovation, and recently virtual democratization a.k.a Web 2.0.

The opponents & their plans

The people that don’t want NN to continue are mostly Telecom & Cable companies. As opposed to the highly regulated Telecom business, the Internet is the Wild Wild West to them. Their argument is… they provide the cables, why can’t they profit from it… more. One of the things they want to do for example:

1. Discrimination of bits, for example to favor VoIP because of latency sensitivity.
2. Toll taxes to access certain parts of the internet.
3. Priority to certain destinations over the internet.
4. Other regulations they might make up to “cover some losses”.

The list could actually go on, but enough said, basically, they want corporate control over what we currently deem a public common. The Telco’s have even gone to the extent of putting up bogus websites to try and attract some sympathy from naive internet surfers (when was the last time you heard that expression? =).

Some hardware companies have opposed net neutrality also. I do not know the reason, and I wouldn’t want to extrapolate, but I can see how money could be made with all the packet filtering and so on.

The Proponents

A strong group FOR net neutrality is the coalition of Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. (It sure feels good to be on Microsoft’s side, doesn’t it?) Others are also for net neutrality, and in my opinion are fighting more for the ideology because they don’t have as many stakes in the game. (Imagine Google needing to pay for everybody that visits their website… of course they are gonna be for net neutrality!). And to mostly everybody’s relief, the groups recently won a battle. Interestingly, there is a little group in Sweden called Piratbyrån who are advocates of piracy.
They use the non-discrimination rule (same as in NN) to say that pirate websites should be allowed to run because bits are bits and shouldn’t be discriminated against.

My conclusion

Morals aside, I totally understand the point of view of the Telcos. I mean, they have a point with latencies and optimizing performance and all that. But the problem is… Telcos are corporate entities. They use the greedy algorithms hardcore. Come on… They are in there for the money, to have something good to report to the investors and to show revenue, profit and growth. On the other side, many of the proponents are ALSO undeniably driven by the same reasons.

In the middle you get the little buggers(Piratbyrån) that use that are the modern equivalent to the hippies (nothing wrong with hippies, I love them), and who may be a little bit too idealistic.

The theory at last

All this stuff above was to explain my unified theory… a lot of rambling eh? So here we go:

1. The main people FOR NN are awfully lot like what would be the centre-wing. (My very bad description of a mixture of moderate right wing and moderate left wing, combining the efforts of Mr Corporate guy and Mr Sort of Grassroot guy).
2. The people AGAINST NN are akin to the right wing (To describe something like right + extreme right, in french political terms). Funny enough, in the recent legislative showdown, all 13 who voted against NN were republican.
3. The little hippies are like the green party. In Mauritius, they would be akin to the MR, if you know what i’m talking about.

I’m a young fellow with a knack for the moderate-idealistic view, so I’m in category number 1.
Who are you with?

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 @ 1:37 am business
RSS 2.0 Trackback