What's In A Name?

ACT I

"If you understood how the internet really works, we'd have to kill you!"

        It's hard to get excited about Net Neutrality. It's just slightly more attention grabbing than "Bias Free Network Protocol and Routing". If Net Neutrality were a rock band, they'd be worse than Creed. Which is too bad, because Net Neutrality is something that everyone who uses the internet for anything at all, ought to be pretty worked up about. It's continued existence or demise will determine how we use the internet, and how the internet grows.

       While everyone--myself included--rightfully mocks former Senator Ted Stevens for his comments describing the internet as a "series of tubes", it's actually not the worst analogy for the internet's infrastructure. I once heard it drunkenly characterized as a sea of rats carrying messages back and forth on their backs--which if you really think about it, isn't that terrible of an analogy either. The point is that explaining how the internet works is inherently difficult because it is a system that is both layered and federated, nearly guaranteeing that any one analogy will fail to encompass the whole. As a result, Net Neutrality is difficult to explain to the uninitiated, and a great many Americans are uninitiated in the operation of even the most basic network, let alone the internet. So rather than add my own poor analogies and explanations to the fray, I'll simply let John Hodgeman and John Stewart do as they do best:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Net Neutrality Act
www.thedailyshow.com
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Get it? Got it? Good.

         Net Neutrality is not something we need to attain. We already have it in this country. What we need is to guarantee it's safety from the encroaching horde of corporations (Mostly the current internet service providers) who wish to exert control over your internet access and profit by that control. The reason we have Net Neutrality already is because the internet was not designed to be anything but neutral. The earliest "routers" could not differentiate between a message that said, "Hello" and a spreadsheet. The original idea was to make large stores of information available from a wide range of locations and therefore provide greater access to them.  In order to be able to trade data about every subject imaginable, the data had to be homogeneous as far as the computers involved were concerned.  The first internet was imagined as a way to connect the vast repositories of knowledge from around the globe.  This is why the internet was largely born in the basements of University research centers.  Also, because that's where the geeks were already congregated.

     Opponents of Net Neutrality have come up with a small cadre of not-so-good arguments for why a tiered internet--where services like Google pay a fee to make sure their transmissions always move to the front of the line--is necessary. Most of them go something like this:

 "We just don't want our customers to see their quality of service degrade  as more and more bandwidth gets consumed by video and gaming!"

--Which is short for, "We're too cheap to upgrade even an inch of our infrastructure without government subsidy and we'd rather control WHICH video you watch and games you play, because, oh yeah, we're a content provider too!"

       And there's the real rub. The market is closed to competitors because the cost of the infrastructure is astronomically high. Which is why the internet service providers we have now were all given incredible tax breaks and government subsidies to allow them to roll it out. This would be okay if the internet and cable were treated like a commodity, just like your gas, electric, and water service. The reality is that the same people who are selling you access to the internet, are selling you content on it, and they want to be sure that they get the biggest piece of that pie.

ACT II

"Why they don't want you to have your Hulu or your Whoop  Whoop."

     Imagine for a moment that several decades ago, the major beverage companies had gone to the government and lobbied for tax breaks and subsidies to bring soda fountains to every American home. Imagine that they were successful in doing so and that today virtually everyone all over the world has access to any beverage available over the new Beverage-net. You want Coke? You got it. You want an Arnold Palmer? Done. You want an obscure German beer? Ja vol!  This is excellent and it revolutionizes beverage consumption and the bar scene (well, the bottlers are going out of business and the liquor stores are pretty much toast, but other than that, there is much rejoicing!) But pretty soon the Big Beverage manufacturers who are making cash hand over fist with their new beverage infrastructure start to see a disturbing trend. People are drinking less Coke and Pepsi. There's a small company in South Africa making a new drink called "Whoop Whoop" which is becoming incredibly profitable, since the new company has never sunk any money into the pre-Beverage-net distribution model. This trend repeats itself across the beverage spectrum with new micro-breweries and juicers able to use the beverage-net to provide a superior product for less. Now Big Beverage wants to save their brands and profit  by implementing controls on the valves. So they make it very easy for you to get Coke, but when you try to get "Whoop Whoop" it comes out of the tap incredibly slowly or not at all. If you still want to get "Whoop Whoop" you can pony up an additional fee on top of what you are already paying for access to the Beverage-net. This anti-competitive practice is exactly what the ISPs in this country would like to engage in to ensure they can continue to be the least bad option when it comes to product choice.

        In a perfect world, the Net Neutrality issue would have been dealt with years ago, as just a little foresight would have made it possible to predict the perfect storm now brewing around this issue. The rapid expansion of DVR, torrent sites, Hulu, Netflix streaming, and the availability of television content on the iTunes store are proving without a doubt that at some not-so-distant point down the road the need for a separate "Cable television" service will become null. The major ISPs, who are all also cable package providers, are being faced with a painful choice, charge 200% more for their internet access services, or strangle their internet access service so as to prevent the aforementioned services from cannibalizing their cable television market. At the same time, wireless internet technologies are about to enter the market at competing speeds. These wireless network providers, namely Verizon and AT&T (both landline ISPs and cable providers as well) are lobbying tirelessly to ensure that their wireless networks do not get included in any Net Neutrality regulation. Devices like the iPhone and the Blackberry and likely hundreds of tablet and notebook computers over the next few years will dramatically increase the marketshare of wireless networks. To exclude them from Net Neutrality regulations simply because they are "wireless" would essentially create two internets, one in which all data is treated equally and one in which it is not.

All of these changes in the way we use the internet--the way we consume data--has upset the apple cart enough that both sides have taken up arms and lawyered up. Those on the side of Net Neutrality have found, for now anyway, a somewhat unlikely ally in the FCC. The telecoms, meanwhile, are attempting to outflank them through their old friends in congress.

ACT III

"In which a government agency actually acts in our interest and John McCain is still an asshole."

         The Federal Communications Commission, created in 1934 to provide oversight for commericial and private radio frequencies and telephony, has established regulations for every major form of communication and data transmission that technology has since birthed--except the internet. The internet has never been classified by the FCC as part of the telecommunications network. Instead, it is referred to as an information service--which is exactly as not-different-at-all as it sounds like it is. The rules that regulate telecommunications networks are more strict than the rules governing information services, and the internet service providers would like to keep it that way. However, in this case, the FCC has the consumers'--and the free market's--back. The FCC introduced it's proposed guidelines for Net Neutrality on October 23rd, exactly one month ago, and are continuing to take comments on the draft rules through March of 2010, the initial round of comments to be delivered in January. The codifying of these rules would be a rather large symbolic if not actual step forward for the proponents of Net Neutrality. While depending on the FCC to regulate and maintain an open internet is perilous in its own right, there has been no other powerful ally to step forward from the Net Neutrality camp. Obama hand-picked the current chairwoman of the FCC for precisely this battle, in a move that I believe was meant to circumvent the need to go through congress.

          Unfortunately for Obama and the proponents of Net Neutrality, John McCain is still skulking about in the halls of the Senate and still willing to sell his soul to whichever interest will pay for his next campaign. The very day that the FCC put its draft rules out for the world to see, John McCain, the Senator who receives the most money from the major telecoms, introduced a bill in the Senate called The Internet Freedom Act of 2009. This is perhaps the most cynically named piece of legislation since Bush's Clear Skies Initiative. The Internet Freedom Act of 2009 (heretofore referred to as: The Get Off My Lawn You Damn Kids Act!) essentially blocks the FCC from crafting any regulation of the internet and places the ENTIRETY of the internet under the purview of Congress. It is an incredibly blatant attempt to ensure that no one interferes with the money making schemes of the telecoms, to whom McCain and a good many other Senators are beholden.

        The issue of maintaining Net Neutrality in this country is a complicated one, insomuch as most of the country is wildly underinformed on the subject and it may be all too easy for the major corporations, who have so much profit at stake, to buy their way into government sanctioned anti-competitive internet provision and a biased internet. It's clear their intent is to bamboozle the public into believing that "Network Management" and "The Internet Freedom Act of 2009" will be good things for them. To quote Arianna Huffington:  “Paging George Orwell! War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, and Freedom is... an Internet controlled by AT&T and Verizon. We can't let that happen. Support Net Neutrality. Let's start by giving it a better name.”

I propose we call it, "If You Were Born Before 1978, Don't Fuck With My Internet!"

 
But that's just me.