Silly Rabbit

Net neutrality is anything but. The term sucks. Let’s retire it.

Most people think net neutrality is inherently good, like freedom, democracy, and sliced bread. But it’s really much more nuanced than that. And therein lies my pet peeve: People just accept net neutrality without giving it a second thought. And the corollary: When net neutrality is actually being violated, you, the innocent Internet user, may not even know, or even care.

As with all intelligent discussions, let’s start at Wikipedia:

Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.

It sounds great right? It sounds perfectly reasonable, and thus defensible. So when people understand the basic premise, more or less think it’s a good idea, and Internet peer pressure (pun-intended, if you get it) also supports it, you naturally support it too. You shut down your brain and don’t give it a separate thought. In reality, there’s a lot more detail and nuance. And that matters, at least from a policy perspective. Obviously the scope of this discussion (and my laziness) disallow us from getting into those details and policy-making arguments. But the point still stands. Net neutrality is not that simple, and let’s talk about a few points and examples.

As cheesy as it sounds, pundits like to use the highway system to describe the Internet. (No, it’s not a set of tubes.) You are probably cringing right now because the term “information superhighway” just popped into your brain. I apologize. So there are rules of the road. By and large, all automobiles on the road follow the same laws, with few exceptions. Tim Wu (no relation), net neutrality pioneer and extraordinaire, says that we pay to get on to the highway, like toll roads. But once we are on, it’s fair game for all. One exception should jump out immediately. Emergency vehicles. Ambulances, fire trucks, police cruisers, etc. They have the right of way. They are above the regular rules. And so, it makes lots of sense when certain Internet traffic should be deemed “emergency traffic”, and thus, get preference in terms of bandwidth, latency, and all that good techie stuff. I’ll leave you to imagine all those situations, but you’re probably thinking NSA and government spying and privacy infringements right now. That’s okay. Next point.

In the theoretical, idealistic world, the Internet is a series of dumb pipes. (Thus, I think “tubes” is actually pretty good.) Bits of data go through the pipes like water. The company (water utility or ISP) does not care and cannot care about the H20 or packets (respectively) flowing through. But the issue is that ISPs do care and they do have the technology to do awesome things like deep packet inspection and traffic shaping, all under the umbrella term of traffic management. (Read the articles. They are good for your soul.) So they can and already do this type of management of traffic. I’ve seen it first hand and have had personal experience. It is business as usual. Just as governments manage highway infrastructure, ISPs and governments manage your Internet traffic. It’s only when the sexy, click-worthy stories come up (Google “Netflix Comcast”) that we actually know its going on. To summarize this paragraph: The Internet is hardly neutral and it will not be neutral going forward. Deal with it.

Further down in the net neutrality Wikipedia article first cited above, it says that even Tim Wu realizes that different apps have different traffic patterns and needs. He has proposed that policy reflect that, and try to categorize traffic into different types of data. So real-time data such as streaming voice and video obviously have different needs than say a plain old webpage with static content. This makes a lot of sense to me. So again, my point is that we cannot live in an ideal world where we think every single IP byte is inherently equal. That’s too simplisitic of a worldview. But now the problem comes down to how do we categorize these different data types? Does the technology support it? It’s really an open question. Smart nerds and policy makers need to lock themselves in a room to discuss this. As far as I know, there have been some steps toward this sort of thing. So I am happy.

Mobile is huge. It has enormous implications in the debate. So how can we properly frame it? Different technologies. Different applications. And even different users. (Think developing countries where a family only ever interacted with a smartphone, and not a traditional computer.) Let me break this into two points for this paragraph. 1) Technology. Before mobile, the Internet was the platform, and the killer app was the Web. They were for all intents and purposes, one and the same. (Yes, I know about mail, and chat, etc. etc. Don’t crucify me, you nerd.) So net neutrality really applied to the Web. It is predominantly about protecting services and the interests of users on the Web, inside of a browser. (Heck, back in the day companies sued each other over browser monopolies. Weird huh?) But with mobile, we now have Internet experiences outside of the browser. Yes, we have mobile apps. So what does net neutrality even mean now? Should we classify app traffic versus Web traffic as part of policy? What are the rules? Again, more fodder for the smart nerds and policy-makers. 2) Human rights and freedoms. For the first time in human history, we have an opportunity for all humans to get connected on a global scale, regardless of their socioeconomic situation. This is a huge opportunity. Many governments and companies want to get people in poor nations online as soon as possible. I think it’s still debatable whether this makes sense or not. But I’m not here to discuss that. But I do provide an observation. These companies and governments are now providing free access to certain online services. That’s great you say. It’s awesome humanitarian aid. Oh yes, but it violates net neutrality. Zing! So again, who is policing this, if it needs to be? Who says that if I am poor, I can only access Google and Facebook services, but have no “right” to access competitors? For the latest, read this article dated July 31, 2014: http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/internet-org-app/

Final point. In developed nations, mobile carriers are now saying certain traffic on your mobile data plan is cheaper or even free, compared to “normal” data. Things like music streaming services or popular apps like Facebook may be essentially free to the end-user, as in “WiFi-free”. Other carriers are offering a la carte. You can pay for certain apps’ data traffic, and not others. It makes lots of sense for businesses and consumers. But ultimately again it violates net neutrality. If you are a consumer today benefiting from this, are you all up in arms? In fact, if you look at the Wikipedia article quote I put up at the top, it only mentions (demonizes!) goverments and ISPs. Does the common consumer know or care?

So perhaps its time we stop using the term “net neutrality”. It just invites too many assumptions. It presents itself as too simplistic. I propose we retire the term. As a society, we should not divide ourselves. We should not demonize the ISPs. Every individual and every organization obviously has their own interests. Let’s all come to the fellowship table, as it were, and work it out. Some people have thrown around terms like “Internet magna carta”. I think that’s pretty slick. But more importantly, it’s implying that there should be a constitution of sorts, to protect the interests (some would argue “freedoms”) of individuals. I’m all for that. Let’s just no longer use the antiquated and abused terms like “neutral” and “equality”.