Startups: Supporting Net Neutrality isn’t “Political”; It’s Pragmatic
I’m passionate about how net neutrality enables startups to thrive without getting permission or paying taxes to the ISPs that people pay to get online.
Net neutrality is the simple principle that the marketplace, not ISPs, gets to decide what apps, websites, and services win and lose, and it’s enabled tens of thousand of entrepreneurs to build new things.
Recently, I’ve been asking California startups to sign a startup/investor support letter for a great state bill that would reinstate the 2015 net neutrality protections that are about to expire, thanks to an FCC that only cares about ISPs. (Yes, you can sign up right up there on that link.)
An odd response I’ve gotten a few times is: “We support net neutrality, but we don’t want to be political.”
When I hear “political” in that context, I take it to mean “partisan” or activist in a way that swerves from the company’s mission.
While I understand the impulse to not be seen as partisan, standing up for net neutrality isn’t partisan; it’s about a company’s self-preservation and standing up for your customers’ rights as well. You aren’t going to lose customers over supporting net neutrality; your employees won’t quit and your investors won’t panic.
In 2014, two years after leaving my job at Wired to run my startup Contextly full-time, I filed detailed comments to the FCC, explaining how net neutrality allowed my company to compete with companies that had raised 1000x more money than we had. Thanks to those comments, I ended being invited to meet with FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, alongside CEOs and lawyers from Stripe, Box, Dropbox, Automattic, CloudFlare and other big internet companies, debating the merits of Title II with Wheeler as he deliberated on what rules to put into place.
This wasn’t being “political”.
My co-founder and I decided to defend net neutrality as a business issue.
Net neutrality allows us to compete by keeping our costs down by protecting us from ISPs that want to create market-distorting pay-to-play fast lanes and to charge access fees so companies like mine actually load for their subscribers. Access fees are not hyperbole; Verizon told a federal court it has the right to charge those fees, even exorbitant ones, and block any site that doesn’t pay up.
Net neutrality isn’t a Republican or Democratic issue either.
Net neutrality is what led Republican chairman Michael Powell in 2005 to quickly fine and censure a DSL provider called Madison River after it started blocking Vonage (an early VoIP provider).
Net neutrality is why led Powell’s Republican successor Kevin Martin to investigate Comcast’s secret blocking of peer-to-peer applications, and eventually order Comcast to cut it out and adopt application-agnostic network management.
Moreover all manners of companies advocate for their own interests, and their customers’ interests. Convenience stores in my neighborhood campaigned against a cola tax.
And just last week, the gaming industry’s lobbying group ESA joined a lawsuit against the net neutrality repeal, because they know that ISPs will abuse their last-mile position to try to shakedown gaming companies.
The ESA likely did that because Time-Warner Cable shook down League of Legends, letting that game’s latency grow and grow for TWC’s subscribers while promising them a great gaming experience. TWC only agreed to let in the traffic that gamers needed after League’s parent company paid up.
ISPs pulled the same trick on Cogent and Level3, which impacted millions of sites, until the FCC banned ISPs from abusing net net principles at the point of interconnection in the 2015 order.
Standing up for net neutrality is standing up for your customers, so that they can be sure your site/service and all the other services they want to use load quickly and without favor. It makes sure that all the markets that serve your customers are open to innovation and won’t be controlled by those who have the capital to pay off ISPs.
It also protects your sysadmins and customer support staff, who will have a hell of a time trying to figure out why your site loads slowly for a customer on the far end of a congested port, when everything looks good in your dashboards and monitoring software.
The plain truth is you are far more likely to lose customers from the effects of losing net neutrality than you are from supporting net neutrality. Most of your customers won’t care; a few will thank you; and those who don’t agree with you will simply let it slide.
Fighting for your right to innovate and serve your customers is technically political; but so is starting a company in the first place. It’s also political to simply do nothing in the face of a threat. Life is full of political decisions.
But a startup supporting net neutrality is not being partisan or swerving from its mission. It’s the right thing to do, both for your startup and for your customers, and dodging that for fear of being “political” is simply acting out of fear, which is no way to run a startup.
So if you are a California and you think net neutrality is important for innovation and free speech, make yourself heard and sign up to support SB 822.
