It’s late on a Monday night. You have homework to do, but
instead, you’re downloading some Rage Against the Machine,
watching the end of the UCLA-Gonzaga game again on YouTube, and
perusing the message boards at BigCorporationsSuck.org. Suddenly,
to your mystification, the download comes to a crawl, the
basketball stream cuts out, and the message board won’t
load.
It must be the Internet connection, you think ““ it’s
too slow. You decide to search for a new broadband provider on
Google, but the search results for “cheaper broadband
provider” won’t load. Curious, you search for
“reasons AT&T is awesome.” Before you can even
blink, you are inundated with 450 million search results. Now would
be a good time to post on that message board, but, of course, the
page still won’t load.
Welcome to the Internet of the future. Broadband providers like
AT&T and Comcast, currently laying a nationwide network of
blindingly fast Internet wires, will soon be able to segregate the
information flowing through those wires into “fast
lanes” and “slow lanes.” Information in the fast
lane will travel at broadband-quality speed, while information in
the slow lane may travel at dial-up speed or worse ““ and the
only way to ensure that your information will be in the fast lane
will be to pay those broadband providers a premium fee.
Internet providers don’t currently divide the content that
they transmit to consumers, but Silicon Valley has been developing
ways for providers to separate different forms of content in order
to deliver it at different speeds. This is ostensibly in order to
be able to ensure that high-bandwidth content like streaming video
is not interrupted by transmission of less-important content, but
telecom companies have seized on it in order to make more
money.
Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T, explained his company’s
thorough reasoning for this in November’s Business Week
magazine: “Now what (Internet companies like Google) would
like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let
them do that. … Why should they be allowed to use my
pipes?” In order to make his point more delicately, he
elaborated: “For a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to
expect to use these pipes (for) free is nuts!”
But those who want all bits of information flowing over the
Internet to be treated the same, as is currently the case, have
adopted the phrase “net neutrality.” Libertarian
groups, consumer groups and large companies that rely on the
Internet for their business (such as Google and Amazon) contend
that forcing content providers to pay to use the fast lane will
choke the Internet of the grassroots innovation that has made it
the most revolutionary communication device in history.
Companies like Google will be inconvenienced by having to pay to
use the fast lanes (or more than inconvenienced, if telecom
companies decide to segregate based on content and not on just who
has paid and who hasn’t), but popular sites such as YouTube,
which require fast connections in order to stream videos, could be
put out of business if they don’t have the money to pay
Whitacre for the privilege of using his pipes.
Last week, Democrats attempted to attach an amendment to a House
communications bill that would have prevented AT&T and other
telecoms from charging premium fees for premium broadband speed,
but the amendment was voted down in the Republican-led Energy &
Commerce Committee ““ ensuring that, whatever else happens,
you’ll always be able to get your Internet fix of committee
chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, at lightning speed. (“Oh, look,
committee chairman Joe Barton listed the Second Amendment as his
favorite! He’s so dreamy!”)
Net-neutrality advocates hope to take the amendment to other
committees in the House and Senate in hopes of attaching it to
another bill, but it’s unclear if this will work ““ this
Congress has been seen as strongly in favor of deregulation across
the board.
Segregating content ““ allowing faster transmission of
high-importance data and prioritizing data that takes up more
bandwidth ““ could be a good idea. You would most likely
prefer that streaming UCLA-Gonzaga video to run uninterrupted even
if it meant a song downloaded more slowly.
But using that technology to penalize companies that can’t
or don’t want to pay to use broadband wires ““
especially since telecom companies already make plenty of money
from the consumers who have to pay for the product ““ could
choke the innovation out of the past decade’s most innovative
force. Sure, the Internet is revolutionary because we can buy books
from Amazon, but it’s even more revolutionary because we can
blog, use Facebook, or find news we can’t find on
television.
All these things will be jeopardized if the providers of those
services have to pay to get their ideas to us. Whitacre is trying
to turn the Internet into his personal front lawn (“Hey! You
kids get away from my pipes! Stop looking at my pipes! Stop
breathing on my pipes! You kids get away from my pipes or I’m
calling the police!”), but it should be more like a community
park, available for anyone who wants to use it. Unfortunately,
unless someone is able to come up with a flaming poop-bag of
reasons to make Whitacre and other telecom executives see the
light, we’ll all end up being left out on the sidewalk.