Net Neutrality Is Bullshit
If you have spent a bit of time on the Internet, you have heard a bit about “Net Neutrality” and how some “terrible” companies or “Congress” are not defending it strongly enough and are thus dooming “something special” about the internet. What is Net Neutrality? People think that a) right now the internet treats data equally and b)that is it is good to conserve this property.
Both ideas are wrong. The internet is already unneutral and unequal and moving in a less neutral direction is a good thing.
First things first, the internet is already not neutral. How so? If we define “non-neutrality” as “ability to pay money to prioritize one’s traffic over others,” there are several ways. If you are one of the big guys, you can lay your own fiber and create data centers closer to your target. A random Google request in Europe goes off the public internet and into a co-located Google datacenter. A random request to another website might have to go all the way to California through the public internet. This is good because Google having its own fiber increases the overall bandwidth of the Internet by making its traffic leave the public web.
If you are not big enough for your own fiber, you probably want to host your company’s data on Akamai or another content delivery network. It still goes through the public internet, just not that far. Video Ads are repeated for many people and need to be delivered without interruption. They make the obvious candidate to always be hosted on a CDN. Do you ever notice why video ads on YouTube or Twitch buffer a lot less than other video content? Does that experience suggest the ad data is treated the “same”?
Generally Net Neutrality does not center on those aspects, which are conveniently forgotten, but rather focuses on the potential desire of Comcast to try and charge you more money for access to different parts of the internet. While Comcast is famous for its shitty customer service and has generally messed up public relations, the obvious question is “why would they want to do that in the first place?” Keep in mind “greed” is a fake explanation. Greed is constant, corporate moves are complex.
There are a couple obvious reasons. The internet has been growing in traffic for a long time and will likely continue to do so. The traffic needs more wires; building and maintaining those wires needs more money. The obvious idea is to make the people who use more traffic pay for it. The slightly less obvious idea is to have some extra lanes for larger amounts of traffic that the supplies can rent. There are plenty of reasons some information might be more important than other.
Think medical devices, self-driving car communication, child alert systems. Do you really want those to compete for bandwidth with someone’s porn downloads?
Yes, just like in real life, hierarchies and priorities on the internet do exist and are good. The fundamental problem here is yet another liberal delusion. The internet is not a powerful force because it’s “equal” or even because it’s “free”. It’s a powerful force because it’s cheap. The hilarious contradiction comes into play when people in India protest literally free partial internet from Facebook because it’s not “neutral” enough. Yes, everybody must have access to all education, which means if some people have access to some education, it’s more important to take it away in the name of equality. Oh, did I say education? I meant internet. Sorry, I have heard so many liberal delusions I have trouble telling them apart.
Anyways, the biggest irony of the whole “net neutrality” push is that Twitter and other companies ban conservatives all the time. Control of people’s political voices by private companies? Doesn’t seem like a problem when it’s being done to the other side. I mean you could always move away from Twitter and set up your own site, which may or may not be removed from Google or DNS. But if your traffic somehow manages to get on the internet despite those problem, there is a chance it will be treated “equally.”
