What is Net Neutrality and how does it affect you?

The future of Internet

What is Net Neutrality?

 

When the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) started providing Internet services to the people they followed the same principle that they had for the telephone lines. The rule is that when you have a phone connection the ISP should not restrict you from calling a specific person. It will allow us to reach anyone, let it be a celebrity, a politician or a murderer. The ISPs didn't place restrictions on any of the calls and all the traffic were treated equally.

In the Internet space, "Net Neutrality" is the norm followed where all the "data" is treated equally. Every person who has access to Internet will be able to reach any website in exactly the same speed. One type of data is not prioritized over another type. So for example, it does not matter if you are searching something in Google or reading a review in Zomato or looking for a new property in 99acres you will be able to access all these pages in the same speed. None of the content providers (e.g, Zomato, 99acres.com, basically all the websites) can make their content load faster than others. This norm makes sure that there is a democracy in the web. 

What is happening now?

 

 Recently there is lot of trouble over maintaining Net Neutrality and to understand it a little bit of history is needed. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in US created the "Open Internet" rules in 2010 which prevented ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner etc., from discriminating some content providers over others. In essence this rule made sure that Net Neutrality was followed by the ISPs. However in Jan 2014 this rule was vacated by the US Court of Appeals. So in order to maintain the democracy in the Internet and ensure that a fair service is provided by the ISPs the FCC needs to create another rule.

Two sides of the story

 

ISPs are saying that the Internet in 1990 was entirely different than now and no one expected people to watch high quality contents via Internet. In the present time, Youtube, Netflix and other sites offer high quality video content which takes up a lot of bandwidth and is not used by everyone. Content providers like these contribute to most of the data being transferred, so ISPs want to be able to charge these content providers accordingly.

Proponents of Net Neutrality say that the Internet was formed on basic principles like Net Neutrality. The democracy in the Internet will be maintained only when no government, public or private enterprise have control on what people see. The freedom of speech will be severely hampered if it is not maintained. They are also against the charge, which the content providers will end up paying, as it would lead to the death of start ups and will support major organizations. The proponents,whom we are talking about, are Google, Facebook, Kickstarter, FourSquare, no of politicians, approximately 1.4 million people who have voiced their opinions in FCC and a lot more.

Apr 2014 Proposal

In Apr 2014, FCC proposed a new rule which will lead to a "tiered internet service", i.e the proposed rule will allow the ISPs to charge the specific content providers so that their content will reach the people faster. This will divide the Internet into a "fast lane" and a "slow lane" where the content providers who pay for their content will end up in fast lane and the rest will be in the slow lane.

FCC started seeking public comment for this rule and as expected this triggered a huge response from the public. Initially the reach of this proposal was only through news and other tech blogs, but it got a major push when John Oliver publicly supported for Net Neutrality in his HBO show "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" . After this the FCC website crashed in the process of recording all the comments.

#GoSlow

 

In order to get more people to support Net Neutrality various organizations like battle for the net, save the internet etc., have taken different steps. A notable step is where a lot of websites posted a "loading" screen image in their website on Sept 10th 2014, which was promoted as "Go Slow",  "Internet Slowdown" campaign and also under other names. Netflix, Mozilla, Reddit, Kickstarter, etc., are some of the websites which participated in the campaign. The general idea is to educate people on the consequences and give them a taste of the future in case the FCC rule came into practice. This campaign gained a lot of momentum and recently FCC website witnessed the maximum number of comments in history for an issue. The comments section for this issue is closing on Sept 15th 2014.

How will this affect business?

 

At this stage all the consequences are only theories as to what would happen and some of them are reasonable and will be immediate. Proponents argue that once this rule comes into place the major content providing companies like Netflix, Youtube etc will start paying charges to make sure that their content reaches the consumers faster. This rule will affect the start ups which would struggle to pay that charge in their initial development phase and the innovation in silicon valley will definitely be affected. We must realize that most of the pages that we visit let it be Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Amazon etc., all started as smaller companies which through their services slowly scaled into larger companies. The growth of such innovative companies will take a major hit due to this rule.
 

How will this affect us?

As consumers we might feel that this simple rule is not going to affect us. We can argue that these companies will get funding to pay for these charges in future or the companies will start coming up in different cities like Tel Aviv or London. The problem is, it does not end there. It is not just some start ups that will be affected. The consumers will soon start paying the ISPs to get access to the fast Internet lanes and those small websites that you access now will be slower. Remember the main lesson in the Internet - Fast is always better than slow. We will start using only the services in the fast lane and other services in the slow lane will take a hit. The ISPs will also gain power on what should load faster for you and will start creating different schemes or packages for this so that you can end up paying more. ISPs will have the power to reduce the traffic to websites which are against them, they will be able to favor one company over another, they can suppress the voice of a new political party. All this may not happen but they will have the power to make it happen.

Now we are thinking that this is happening in US, how is it affecting an Indian citizen? First this issue is not happening just in US. For your information, Chile is the first country to have a rule supporting Net Neutrality. Second there will be no effect in India because of this rule for now. At the moment Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has provided guidelines to the ISPs to make sure an "Unified Access Service" is provided. In case the existing proposal of FCC is made into a rule then other countries will soon follow suit. Before we realize Airtel, Docomo and other companies might start creating custom broadband packages and will ask everyone to pay more. We will be able to prevent such a scenario only if we educate the people who will be affected. So lets try and share thoughts regarding Net Neutrality before it arrives in India and before the rule changes :)