TECHNICALLY, the Internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and you will see your second cousin’s baby pictures. But, that isn’t really the Internet. It’s not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the product of technologies created over decades through government funding and academic research, the network that helped undo Microsoft’s stranglehold on the tech business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix.
Nope, that freewheeling Internet has been dying a slow death — and a vote next month by the Federal Communications Commission to undo net neutrality would be the final pillow in its face.
Net neutrality is intended to prevent companies that provide Internet service from offering preferential treatment to certain content over their lines. The rules prevent, for instance, AT&T from charging a fee to companies that want to stream high-definition videos to people.
Because net neutrality shelters startups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from Internet giants that can pay, the rules are the last bulwark against the corporate takeover of much of online life. When that happens, the Internet will look and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.
If this sounds alarmist, consider the state of digital competition, which is pretty sorry. Much of the tech industry is at risk of getting swallowed by giants. Today’s Internet is lousy with gatekeepers, tollbooths and monopolists.
The five most valuable American tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, — provide virtually all the Internet connections to American homes and smartphones.
Together, these giants have carved the Internet into a historically profitable system of fiefs. They have turned a network whose very promise was endless innovation into one stuck in mud, where every startup is at the mercy of some of the largest corporations on the planet.
Many companies feel this shift. In a letter to Ajit Pai, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, who drafted the net neutrality repeal order, more than 200 startups argued this week that the order “would put small- and medium-sized businesses at a disadvantage and prevent innovative new ones from even getting off the ground”. This, they said, was “the opposite of the open market, with a few powerful cable and phone companies picking winners and losers instead of consumers”.
This was not the way the Internet was supposed to go. The Internet was designed to avoid the central points of control that now command it. The designers of the Internet understood that communications networks gain new powers through their end nodes — that is, through the new devices and services that plug into the network, rather than the computers that manage traffic on the network. This is known as the “end-to-end” principle of network design, and it basically explains why the Internet led to so many more innovations than the centralised networks that came before it, such as the old telephone network.
The Internet’s singular power, in its early days, was its flexibility. People could imagine a dazzling array of new uses for the network, and as quick as that, they could build and deploy them — a site that sold you books, a site that catalogued the world’s information, an application that lets you “borrow” other people’s music, a social network that could connect you to anyone.
You didn’t need permission for any of this stuff; some of these innovations ruined traditional industries, some fundamentally altered society, and many were legally dubious. But, the Internet meant you could just put it up, and if it worked, the rest of the world would quickly adopt it.
But, if flexibility was the early Internet’s promise, it was soon imperiled.
In 2003, Tim Wu, a law professor now at Columbia Law School (he’s also a contributor to The New York Times), saw signs of impending corporate control over the growing Internet. Broadband companies that were investing great sums to roll out faster and faster Internet service to Americans were becoming wary of running an “anything-goes” network.
To Wu, the broadband monopolies looked like a threat to the end-to-end idea that had powered the Internet. In a legal journal, he outlined an idea for regulation to preserve the Internet’s equal-opportunity design — and hence, was born “net neutrality”.
Though it has been through a barrage of legal challenges and resurrections, some form of net neutrality has been the governing regime on the Internet since 2005. The FCC order would undo the idea completely; companies would be allowed to block or demand payment for certain traffic as they liked, as long as they disclosed the arrangements.
At the moment, broadband companies are promising not to act unfairly, and they argue that undoing the rules would give them further incentive to invest in their broadband capacity, ultimately improving the Internet.
Brian Hart, an FCC spokesman, said broadband companies would still be covered by antitrust laws and other rules meant to prevent anti-competitive behaviour. He noted that Pai’s proposals would simply return the network to an earlier, pre-network-neutrality regulatory era. NYT