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Tech Corner
Two sides of net neutrality
Editor’s note: This is part 2 of 2 of a series on Net Neutrality.
By TERRE PORTER
Article published on Wednesday, July 12, 2006 |
A flash cartoon from internetofthefuture.org describes the Internet of the future as a bigger multilane interstate super information highway for traffic with some lanes like the bus lane for special types of traffic.
Sounds perfect to me.
But, these people compare the Internet with net neutrality as being one big messy one-lane highway. They’re against it.
Another flash cartoon shows how the big Internet companies – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – want to use a large portion of this new high speed Internet, but make the consumer pay for it. This cartoon also refers to net neutrality as government regulation, with mountains of guidelines and rules.
However, an article from news.com titled, “Net neutrality field in Congress gets crowded” talks about several different ideas.
I don’t see anything in the bureaucratic stuff (Internet Freedom Preservation Act at www.publicknowledge.org/node/371) that says there can’t be traffic lanes built into the network or anything about tons of bureaucratic regulation paperwork. It does say companies cannot play favorites. The Internet was and is suppose to be equal.
The site www.savetheinternet.com offers videos showing how the Internet is today and how it could be if net neutrality didn’t become law. The videos describe a disruption to access to sites and content and refer to a tier service and having to pay more to host sites and services online. These people are for net neutrality.
I pay for a connection to the Internet, period, I don’t want to be filtered or influenced by my Internet service provider. If that happens, then the big sites – the ones with money – will be the only sites on the Net.
Makes me think of the next generation Internet more like a pay phone: “I’m sorry, please deposit 25 cents to visit the next site.”
The tier service fee sounds scary, but I think that tier Internet access service already exists. There are many ways to connect to the Internet for a consumer – dial-up, cable, DSL; and for companies, T1, OC3. Each way costs a different price depending on connection speed.
People against net neutrality scare me into thinking of government control and a big slow traffic jam Internet and that I, the consumer, will foot the bill for the big companies to suck up all the Internet usage. I don’t like that.
While the people for net neutrality say I’ll lose control over which sites I can visit or how fast I can get content from sites, and I might have to pay more to host my content online. I don’t like that either.
This is getting more confusing. I feel like I want to scream, “What is net neutrality?”
According to Wikipedia.org, “The term has come to stand for the principle that network providers should not discriminate between people or organizations that provide services over a network. Companies selling broadband Internet access to consumers should not make contracts with service providers (such as Web sites) to provide better Internet access than is available for service providers who don’t have such agreements.”
That definition makes more sense to me.
At first I was in a panic when writing this article. I read lots of things about net neutrality and how it was going to affect the Web. I was totally against the idea of government regulation.
Then my business thoughts came in. What if each network provider started wanting my company to pay extra for the privilege of their users being able to access my Web site. Then other countries would model after us, because they do sometimes, and start charging also.
Not that I care to have more spam from China, but what if Australia or Britain decided to charge extra for any content originating from the United States? The information super highway just became a super toll road.
As a business, I would be forking out money just to let people view my site and access my content. I thought I already did that, when I paid my hosting company. Of course, this is a worse case possibility.
Would I feel safer if net neutrality was law? From a business side, definitely, I would feel safer. I don’t trust big business. What does it matter if net neutrality is in the rules? Big businesses, such as AT&T, already said they aren’t going to block or degrade Internet content, so why are they fighting this so fiercely?
I don’t think we’re going to have much choice about who is going to pay for the next generation Internet. We are, either in higher cost to get online or in the products and services that use the Internet.
This is one topic that should be watched very closely. How the Internet is being used to meet business and consumer’s needs could be drastically changed.
Terre Porter is vice president of Webpage Builders Inc. Tech Corner questions can be sent to him by e-mailing tporter@webpage-builders.com.
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Article published on Wednesday, July 12, 2006
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