A recent article by the Heritage Foundation’s Blog, The Foundry, sheds some commonsensical light on an issue that I believe has become unnecessarily complicated and contentious. It states the following: “The most common myth that appears in “net neutrality” debates, even ones that appear in our comment section, is that the internet needs regulation in order to stay “neutral.” In reality, the internet is as open and adaptive as it is because it has been free of government regulation.”
It is important to understand that the Internet has grown to what it is today within the framework that currently exists. In other words, heavy regulation did not play a role in Internet service providers’ ability to effectively deploy broadband infrastructure and build it up to the successful technological marvel that it has undeniably become. Many will say that while a loose regulatory framework has allowed this technology to be born, given its size and potential for growth, regulators now hold the responsibility to manage this new technology in order to ensure that business continues to run smoothly.
Well, I say that there is no real, warranted reason to change a structure that works. In this case, broadband providers have been able to effectively deliver services to consumers with little, if any, incident. Given this push to develop net neutrality rules that will in fact change how broadband providers conduct business, I think the FCC has at least made a wise choice in opting to work closely with industry stakeholders and other policymakers. However, the full picture of what the FCC has proposed in its most recent net neutrality order has yet to be completely seen by the American public. My goal is to help Americans, and more specifically, Hispanic Americans, better understand how these new rules will impact their families and communities. I will continue to conduct the necessary research to make sure that I bring the facts and benefits in full view for all to see.
I’m back, with the proof in the pudding: net neutrality will be secured by technology. Here, from a Reddit forum, is the lengthy peroration: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/iwi43/net_neutrality_is_an_engineering_problem_that_was/
Net Neutrality is an attempt to solve a problem through government regulation that engineers solved long ago through technology.
What is it that proponents of net neutrality fear? They fear that ISPs will charge different amounts depending on which web site you visit, which streaming video source you use, etc. They want government regulations that make that illegal. This is a legitimate concern. What is it that net neutrality opponents fear? They fear that the government will pass regulations based upon whether you are watching a video from NetFlix and posting a video to YouTube or whether you are downloading a pirated movie you found on The Pirate Bay and uploading a data file to WikiLeaks. This is also a legitimate concern.
Both are legitimate concerns, and both have the same technical solution: make it so neither the ISP or the government can tell what kind of bits you are sending and receiving, or tell what sites you are accessing. If all they can see is an encrypted stream of bits indistinguishable from any other set of encrypted bits, they will have no choice but to treat all the bits equally.
This technology is available right now, but it is still rather clunky, requires special configuration, and is rather slow, but we also don’t have any actual examples of either of the above fears happening in real life – just predictions of future trouble – to drive technological progress. If either the ISPs or the government actually start discriminating based upon content, protocol, website, or anything else, that will simply trigger the widespread roll-out of a system that makes it impossible for them to tell one bit from another.
Technical details: (you can skip this paragraph if you wish) Imagine if every PC and every server on the net were nodes on something like a TOR (The Onion Router). Each would act as a middle relay for other onion traffic, but would also act as a specialized entrance/exit relay that can only access the local network. so your web browsing gets mixed in with a bunch of other traffic that is using the bridge node and nobody monitoring the traffic has the slightest clue as to whether you are sending and receiving bits, where they are going, etc. Now I am not saying that the existing TOR system will be good enough – there would be some major performance issues – but it is certainly possible using current technology to make any violation of net neutrality physically impossible, and it is entirely feasible to develop a better system with less of a performance hit.
The bottom line is that engineers are ready to make the entire Net Neutrality issue moot if there is a need to do so. If either side of the current debate wins and it’s as bad as the the other side says it is, we will simply roll out a new system that makes it so that neither the corporations or the government has the ability to discriminate against different kinds of data. Because we have this capability, it would be a colossal waste of effort for either the corporations or the governments to discriminate against some bits or favor other bits.
EDIT: For those who still insist on making this a political argument (and ignoring the fact that it clearly has a technical solution), I suggest reading the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality –especially the “Arguments for network neutrality” and “Arguments against network neutrality” sections.
I’m done.