In politics more than anywhere else, everything begins with moral indignation. — Milovan Djilas

I am sitting on a small island in Indonesia. It is mid-morning in May, 2014, and very bright. Along the horizon huge cumulus clouds billow upwards for thousands of feet, like gigantic Himalayan peaks, their crests a dazzling white above the thunderous grays of not-so-distant rain storms. Buried among the tropical trees behind me are scores of small dilapidated houses, with the rusty corrugated metal roofs one sees everywhere in Sulawesi. In front of me is a small laptop. A browser is open, and it is slowly loading dozens of pages in different tabs.

Back in Washington, DC, demonstrators are camped outside the FCC in tents, and are about to disrupt its televised hearings. The articles I’m loading attack the FCC as well. They all make the same point: the FCC is going to destroy the Internet by allowing big corporations to pay for “fast lanes” that will load their web sites faster on everybody’s phones and computers than the rest of the Internet.

The wifi here in Sulawesi is terribly slow. Whenever a distant web site sends me a page, a quarter or more of it is lost — the technical term is “dropped” — and my browser has to re-request those bits of the page, again and again and again. The browser just gives up on the images, showing “broken image” icons instead. The pages load excruciatingly slowly, taking minutes at a time.

But not all of them. If I point my browser at http://cnn.com, based in Atlanta, Georgia, that page loads in just 20 seconds. If I want to, which I don’t, I can instantly read the drivel that CNN considers headline news: Magic Johnson’s response to Donald Sterling’s racist rants, Mariah Carey’s struggles to fit in somewhere, and fresh video of a husband in Pakistan just after his wife was stoned to death. On the other hand, the page of my American bank ultimately never loads, despite repeated attempts. Why is this? Is it because CNN has more money than my bank, and can afford better and faster servers? Impossible: my bank’s market capitalization would allow it to buy CNN many times over.

No: The reason CNN and some other large corporations’ sites load faster in Indonesia and the rest of the world, is that they have paid to use Internet fast lanes. Web sites have been paying to use fast lanes for almost sixteen years, fast lanes that the demonstrators outside the FCC think do not yet exist. Yet the sky hasn’t fallen, the Internet hasn’t been destroyed; the Armageddon that the net neutrality FCC demonstrators fear never occurred.

Quite the contrary. Google was founded in 1998. Wordpress and Skype were created in 2003. Facebook went live 2004, Reddit and YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006; the list goes on and on. Every one of these companies began life as a tiny start-up, sometimes in somebody’s garage, and they all succeeded in spite of the Internet fast lanes available to their competition.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that these fast lanes led to the success of the Internet; but it does mean they didn’t stop it.

However, we must be careful not to overstate the case. First of all, net neutrality experts aren’t worried about this kind of fast lane, but a slightly different one; and what worries them isn’t speed, but a lack of competition. Second, these different lanes are intended to be “just-as-fast lanes”, not faster than everything else. CNN just wants to be as fast as the average website, in average places. It is only where Internet access is poor, as in much of the developing world, that they become “fast lanes” — faster than other sites.

That said, there is a widespread view that any difference in delivery quality and speed that can be bought is a “fast lane” that will devastate competition and innovation on the Internet, and that support for it is morally outrageous. This is a vulgar net neutrality view, and the past sixteen years of just such fast lanes prove unequivocally that it is false.

The Corporate Dog That Won’t Bark

The most common view opposed to net neutrality is just as problematic; we might call it vulgar anti-net neutrality.

Every year, every public corporation in America must complete and file Form 10K with the Securities and Exchange Commission; these forms are all publicly available on the Internet.

Should a company’s stock price seriously decline later that year, and the company could have reasonably foreseen why but failed to say so in either Item 1A or Item 7 of Form 10K, the consequences are devastating. In addition to SEC fines, US law entitles shareholders to recoup their losses from the company’s remaining wealth and assets.

Let’s assume that Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other giant Internet service providers each believes that its network has been swamped with traffic from the likes of Netflix; that upgrading a network to handle this traffic would be exorbitantly expensive, perhaps so expensive that Netflix ought to pay for part or all of it.

If this is the case, we should expect to read all about it in at least one of the 10K forms these companies have filed in the past several years.

Instead, there is nothing.

What we find are worries about revenue lost as more customers cancel their telephone landlines forever; about revenue lost to customers who “cut the cord” of cable TV in favor of entertainment on the Internet; and, before 2014, of uncertainty over the outcome of network regulation working its way through the courts. In fact, rather than invest in new or improved broadband Internet networks, these companies appear focussed on signing up more customers for their existing networks.

So the view that Netflix and similar companies are putting giant Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon in distress is implausible, because there is nothing about it in the 10K forms. Like other vulgar net neutrality views, this vulgar anti-net neutrality view inspires moral indignation, but is at odds with the facts.

What is Net Neutrality? →