Stories about net neutrality inevitably suffer the curse that they fail to explain. Stories claiming 25 cent Google searches or $1 Pandora songs upset people, but they may not be the most accurate threat to fear from a world without net neutrality.
Net neutrality needs an elevator pitch. Less technical people must understand what’s at stake. And telling them the issue is paying a dime per tweet doesn’t help.
A world without net neutrality is a world without competition.
In the early days of the Internet, only small companies and universities handled Internet traffic. There weren’t billions of dollars changing hands. There will only 130 websites in 1993. However, even then early companies attempted to place limits on what content you could access. We called these “walled gardens.” There were services like Prodigy, Compuserve, and America Online which, back then, kept you in a bubble where you were only allowed to consume content created by that corporation and its partners.
Comcast, Verizon, and others want to return to a world of walled gardens. However, instead of controlling literally everything you see, they want to shut out direct competitors for now. With online video, many cable companies supported Hulu and charged extortionate fees to Netflix. With payments, some cellphone companies actively blocked Google Pay in favor of a massively inferior payment service called ISIS. There are numerous threats to competition.
A world without net neutrality is a world without free speech.
Imagine Comcast has a bad customer support interaction that gets recorded and posted to Youtube. This isn’t hard to imagine! In a world without net neutrality, they could slow the virality of a video down by discriminating against the traffic. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of users abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. This is compounded by viral videos because that 40% won’t see the video to tell their friends who then won’t tell their friends.
This also applies to political freedoms. If a news website supports net neutrality and opposes Comcast, how likely is Comcast to offer a fair price to let their customers reach the content? This was not a concern before “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” existed.
A world without net neutrality is a world without privacy.
In order to have “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” an Internet company must read the packets being sent over the network. This means they potentially have access to everything anyone does or says and the ability to block it. Once companies establish a right to slow down certain types of traffic, the law also implies a right to see what videos you watch.
The loss of privacy is the least explained aspect. When content is no longer neutral, enforcing limits on content requires reading it like a censor. If your service provider is run by evangelical Christians or Catholics, will they slow sites explaining how to use birth control? There are important political freedoms at risk.
Can you live in a world without privacy, free speech, and competition?
