Information Turnpike
If you (foolishly) take an on-line tutorial on how the World Wide Web works, you’ll read that content on the Internet is served up to us in “packets.” You can think of your content packet as being inside an envelope. The envelope has a return address,where the content originated from, and a delivery address, your computer or phone. Content addressed to your computer zooms along the webbed pathways of the Internet (mostly comprised of fiber-optic cable) until it reaches its delivery address: your computer. Net Neutrality means that all packets are treated the same, regardless of what the return address says.
The trouble with this analogy is that it doesn’t tell us much about the so-called “webbed pathways” and how the “packets” travel along them. So it’s hard to visualize just how some packet could be given priority over others. Let’s try again.
In the early days of the Internet, it was called the Information Superhighway. It was a good way to explain how information could be found and delivered to our computers with a speed that was previously un-imagined. So let’s say the internet (it’s so commonplace we don’t capitalize the word any more) is represented by our network of interstate highways and public roads and streets. Packets are loaded into cars, not envelopes. If they’ve got a long way to travel, cars want to leave the streets and get onto the freeway as fast as possible, and stay on the interstate until as close as possible to the destination. The routing algorithms of the internet, like GPS, impartially direct each packet (car) to find the fastest route to its destination. And, under Net Neutrality rules, that was all there was to it.
Just like real highways, the internet has always incorporated technology that could be used to grant access to the roads in something other than a neutral fashion. We have fast lanes and slow lanes, speed limits — and toll booths.
The companies that invested in laying down the great bundles of optical fiber that form the backbone of the modern Internet need to get return on their investment by charging senders and receivers of packets for transporting the data from one address to another. There are only six of these Tier 1 providers in the world: Level 3 Communications , Tata Communications , Telia Carrier , NTT , GTT, and Cogent. These great multinational corporations share what are known as “peering” agreements with one another, merging their hardware assets into the ubiquitous network we call the World Wide Web.
Then there are Tier 2 Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who aggregate traffic from homes and businesses and direct it onto the Tier 1 backbones. They are like the streets of a town or city. As you might expect, if you don’t live in a town or city, getting internet service is harder, more expensive, and typically not as good. But that’s another story — one that we hope we can address soon.
Comcast is logically a Tier 2 provider, though in the US it’s so powerful that it has many of the privileges of a Tier 1 network. Other cable providers, and DSL providers like CenturyLink, and municipal networks like Longmont’s NextLight, are Tier 2 as well.
The enterprises that make the internet interesting are called Content Providers. Whether they provide digital content like video and music, or whether they provide a catalog of real-life items you can purchase on-line, or just information, like LexisNexis or a university, as far as the internet is concerned, you are providing “content.” Content is something of value that clients on the internet (that’s you) want to access.
Tier 2 ISPs charge you for providing a path from your home or office or mobile device to the backbone of the internet with its wealth of content. They also pay access to the rest of the internet, in the form of paid peering agreements or transit fees. A peering agreement is a pact by two internet providers to treat each other’s packets as if they were their own. Transit fees are required when a packet needs to travel a route for which your ISP does not have a peering agreement. Under Net Neutrality, transit fees can’t be discriminatory, and all packets are routed and forwarded the same. As an internet subscriber, you don’t see any of this. The World Wide Web just works.
In most cases it is the Tier 2 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who are looking to profit from discriminating among content providers. For example, Comcast, who is both an ISP and a content provider, would like to favor video from its own channels over on-demand streaming traffic from Netflix or Amazon. Alternately, Amazon and Netflix could pay Comcast for equal bandwidth serving Comcast’s subscribers. In 2014, under the Obama administration, the FCC ruled that these practices — an ISP like Comcast prioritizing its own content above rivals like Netflix — were not permitted. But this month, on December 14, 2017, under chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC rescinded the Net Neutrality regulations and returned cutthroat capitalism to the World Wide Web.
If Disney, Amazon, and Netflix want to eat their own young by indulging in bandwidth bidding wars, so be it. America has already cut the cord once, realizing that on-demand streaming video works just as well for much less cost than 250 cable TV channels. If we now cut the cord again because streaming video gets too expensive, that won’t hurt us in a meaningful way. Maybe we’ll rediscover reading books. The real loser of these bidding wars won’t be any of the massive content providers like Amazon or Disney. It won’t be the consumers of video and music, either. It will be our children, and the businesses on Main Street, USA.
The Internet was conceived as a tool for commerce, yes, but for education, and research, and basic communication. We pay our bills by computer (or phone). We store our recipes and our photos in the cloud. Schools and nonprofits today in many areas of the US provide computers for lower-income families, because kids can’t do their homework without them. Those who don’t have internet service in the home may get cellular hotspots. The internet is ubiquitous in our lives, and while some things it provides, like unlimited movies and TV, are luxuries that we can do without, other things have become necessities.
Who will pay for bandwidth for content providers with URLs ending in .EDU and .ORG and .GOV? Chili’s and Panera may still have well-performing web-sites with on-line ordering, but what about that great hole-in-the wall barbecue place on the corner? Replays of Groundhog Day may sail through the toll kiosks in the cloud with their EZ-Pass, not even slowing down. But www.unco.edu will be five cars back in the cash-only lane, searching under the front seat for correct change.
Learn More: More than you want to know about Internet Peering and Transit Fees.
