Net neutrality and its discontents

Unlike those billions living under authoritarian regimes like China, Americans have never been subjected to the same kind of broad-reaching censorship of internet information since its invention some twenty-odd years ago. The World Wide Web has long been an egalitarian utopia of ideas and dialogue, where no one opinion or position was favored or disadvantaged. While, for the most part, this remains true, increased governmental regulation of internet content and elevated pressure from content distribution conglomerates and their lobbyists have begun to fundamentally influence the nature of the web we know and love. As content production and distribution companies like NBC or Universal Studios and internet service and cable providers like Comcast become one and the same entity, the lucrative motivation to vertically integrate the content creation and delivery mechanisms is often too hard to overcome. As they announce new products to deliver their media content to consumers, these corporations invariably look for ways to gain an advantage over competing services offering similar content, crippling bandwidth speeds for third-party sites and making it more and more difficult to choose the content distribution service of your choice. The practice of certain content providers to pay internet service providers in the interest of favoritism in terms of bandwidth allowance goes against net neutrality, which dictates that all content distribution and web content exists on a level playing field in its delivery to end users. In a network-neutral environment, “Amazon [w]ould not be able to pay to have its website load faster than a mom-and-pop e-commerce site, for example.”¹ In their quest to control every media experience their customers have access to, these companies fundamentally violate the notion of a free and open internet by instead supplying a proprietary and integrated product set which limits the customer’s ability to choose. The reach and influence of these conglomerates on the types of internet experiences Americans have access to has spiraled dangerously out of control, and it’s not long before their self-serving financial interests begin dictating the modes of informative content citizens might access—if that hasn’t begun happening already.

The issue originates in a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the American people of what the internet actually consists of. As Denis Arnold mentions in his piece concerning a book on net neutrality, some economists and researchers believe that “the Internet should be regarded as a resource held in common in the same way that radio spectrum, national parks, language, public streets, and writings in the public domain are held in common.”² While their idealism is inspiring, it’s important to note that unlike the public sector, where people can voice their opinions equally under the protection of the First Amendment, the internet doesn’t quite fit nicely into the public domain. The web as we understand it is a set of protocols, technologies which facilitate the communication of digital information from an end-user computing product to a web server and back again, possibly interacting with additional end users in the process. At a base level, the internet is simply the term for the experience we have when we make use of broadband cable infrastructure and advanced server hardware, each component owned by one large corporation or another. For this reason, it often becomes difficult for the Federal Communications Commission to regulate practices on the internet, seeing as certain policies would interfere with fundamental operations of some internet service providers (ISPs). Of course, like many Americans, most Congresspeople have a cursory understanding of internet technologies, and are therefore applying the same logic that applied decades ago to other service providers for cable television and landline telephone.

However, television and telephone service could not be more different than internet access, leading to a conflation of values and understandings. As Robin Lee and Tim Wu highlight in their 2009 article on the economics of net neutrality, “telephone and cable television networks were designed from the outset as commercial networks, where payments were the prerequisite to connectivity at all.”³ For this reason, telephone networks like Bell/Ameritech or cable television providers like AT&T or SBCGlobal (all four of these companies are now under the umbrella of one corporation, as it happens) could historically have charged termination fees for cancellation or suspension of service, and explicitly tended to favor one type of connection—say, a call between two Bell Telephone subscribers—over another, and charged accordingly. “The general practices specified by the phrase ‘network neutrality’ emerged not as a closely considered policy decision,” write Lee and Wu, “but as a consequence of how the Internet was designed and how it spread.”³ The network was not designed to generate profit for the corporations managing its infrastructure, but rather was conceived as an egalitarian information superhighway to share large amounts of free and equal information, “to make it possible for users of any single computer network to reach users on any other network.”³

As we have seen, this allows for the users of the internet—that is, everyday people with broadband internet access and a webcam—to broadcast their own unique ideas and creations in equal measure with media production corporations with millions of dollars devoted to marketing resources and promotional strategizing. A Canadian teenager with a girlish voice and a propensity for hip gyration can upload original songs to YouTube and become an international pop superstar, all without following traditional recording label channels for production and exposure. And while the story of Justin Bieber is the idealized exception, the idea remains true that the origin of content on the internet has since its inception been completely irrelevant in terms of its eventual reach and potential success. Even when the medium is a video on a site like YouTube, among the large content creation companies like ABC, Miramax Films, or Walt Disney Media (again, these all happen to be the same corporation), there is equal opportunity for your message or content to be delivered to as many American homes as its popularity warrants. Increasingly, content distributors and cable companies are pushing for this to be no longer true, because the delivery of said amateur content is nowhere near as lucrative to corporate content providers, who may be bankrolling (or, bribing) the types of network changes that these distributors are deploying. Write Lee and Wu on the subject:

[One] can reach any other user who is similarly connected to the Internet. The overall network does not, by its own design, distinguish between content providers and users. Consequently, content providers—who may also be users—are also able to reach an audience consisting of every single Internet user.³

The subsequent issue becomes then an issue of free speech in the realm of the internet, which may be curtailed or wholly censored by large self-serving corporations upon whose channels these messages would be delivered. Especially in danger are those amateur content providers whose political or idealogical views are at odds with any conglomerate, making their ideas and voice on the web virtually nonexistent as a result. This kind of internet censorship is directly relatable to similar practices in regimes like China, where the government limits access to pro-democracy content and anti-party messaging on internet connections coming into its citizens homes. A Google image search for “Tiananmen Square,” for example, would deliver to a Chinese users a series of recent pictures from the monument rather than the iconic picture from the 1989 protests that the searcher was doubtless seeking. That is, the search would be delivered that way until Google pulled their services out of China for these very reasons in 2010.

Many of the concerns surrounding the issue of net neutrality are purely theoretical, and oftentimes founded on practices of governments and corporations in dystopian literature or film. However, it’s important to also note that many real-life companies are beginning to violate these fair practices even today. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix—among the most popular internet video providers which has recently been at the center of the net neutrality debate—expressed his frustration in an online post regarding a competing service and unfair business practice from Comcast, a massive cable provider to millions of Americans. Concerning a recent experience versus Comcast’s Xfinity video streaming service, direct competitor to Netflix and other video streaming sites, Hastings posted to his Facebook page,

If I watch last night’s ‘S.N.L.’ episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my [data] cap, but if I watch that same episode through [Comcast’s] Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn’t use up my cap at all. In what way is this neutral?⁴

This anticompetitive measure by Comcast would certainly be frustrating to the leader of the competing service it directly disadvantages, but it should also be abhorrent to users who are the ones seeking this content daily and whose internet browsing experience would be significantly altered if these practices proliferate. However, American consumers have extremely limited options in regards to the access points for internet content in our living rooms and offices. Writes Eduardo Porter in his New York Times article on the subject, “To reach the multitude of online services competing for your attention, you must first get through a bottleneck that is not competitive at all: high-speed broadband access.”

As he goes on to highlight, 96% of Americans are forced to choose between “at most two broadband internet providers, allowing regional prices to skyrocket and granting the companies involved free reign of their anticompetitive practices.⁴ Content providers like HBO with their HBO Go service, NBC with Comcast, and ESPN with WOW! Digital Cable and others have already begun picking favorites and signing content distribution deals that impact users on opposing cable networks. Verizon, traditionally a cellular data provider with tens of millions of subscribers, recently launched their FiOS internet access and video distribution bundle in select cities, bringing with them a slew of exclusive or prioritized internet content, speaking to the profitable nature of the anticompetitive business models. These agreements ensure premium access to those cable service subscribers who selected the correct network, meaning that customers of Comcast and AT&T UVerse will have access to an increasingly divergent internet experience. Rather than a digital divide between the internet haves and have-nots, Americans consumers in coming generations will be forced to navigate one between access-can and cannots.

Frustratingly, little is being done from a legal standpoint to curtail these destructive practices and rein in the corporate entertainment trusts. In fact, commissioners in the US House of Representatives just recently voted to limit the number of practices the FCC is enabled to regulate, and Congressional Republicans pushed to overturn the FCC’s recent rules regarding net neutrality.⁴ Despite the fact that the issue of network neutrality has gotten little national media exposure, President Obama pledged to veto any such measure if it graced his desk.¹ Significantly, among the GOP commissioners who fought against the FCC’s regulations was Rep. Meredith Baker, who now works as a lobbyist for Comcast. The financial and lobbying reach of these conglomerates ensures that without public outcry, nothing will be accomplished by way of limiting their seizes for power. Further, it is not a slippery-slope argument to propose that, given the opportunity to capitalize further on content distribution, cable providers like Comcast would continue their current trends and disable or disallow even more sectors of the internet. As more traditional print media enters the digital sphere in the form of ePub books and magazines, the stakes are raised for idealogical and political censorship in the American internet sphere. Thankfully, recent intellectual property legislation like SOPA, ACTA, and PIPA have generated a significant amount of discussion due to the oppositional participation of large internet content providers like Google and Wikipedia, but the issue extends well outside the realm of digital music rights. And, certainly, the stakes are higher than which gibberish product name, Netflix or Xfinity, delivers the latest Mad Men to American living rooms.