The Internet & Net Neutrality - Time to Pay Attention

- Daniel Bernal

It’s been a year and a half since the Net Neutrality (NN) trumpets started blowing. In the summer of 2005, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – our southern-neighbours version of the Canada Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) – decided to drop the regulations regarding NN, opting instead for “suggested principles.” The monopolists (The Bell Globe Media’s and AT&T’s) lobbying paid off. Back in 2002, cable providers fared similarly. The argument put forward is that older regulations were obsolete for new technologies, and thus the principle of Net Neutrality was dropped. This was the start of what could be called “the two-tiered internet paranoia,” and showed that the fear of ISP content regulation had become very much a reality.

Advocates of NN in the United States, mostly all under the banner of the organization Save the Internet.com, started fighting to bring the standards back, while the other side claimed regulation was pointless. And so we’ve lived the last year and a half in the midst of uncertainty while the US Congress argued about the future of the net.

In Canada, apart from our gullibility and apparent apathy about the huge issue of monopolies regulating the Internet, the situation isn’t much different.

What is interesting about the American NN scene is that their advocacy campaigns consistently cite NN violations that have occurred in Canada. ISPs north of the border have already played around with our (the consumer’s) data-packets to serve their interests.

In 2005, during a Telus Workers Union strike, the company decided to block its users from access to pro-union websites, or sites hosted o the same server. Not only did this action directly affect the organization of the Union but harmed businesses at the same location.

Many ISPs are also the biggest phone companies in the country. The emergence of Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony technologies has bothered traditional phone companies. As such, VoIP service providers such as Skype or Vonage, enterprises that could have only arises thanks to neutrality of the net and faster speeds, are facing increasing barriers.

Shaw cable has allocated a portion of its bandwith specifically to its own VoIP service under the label of a “managed network.” They have also introduced “quality of service” fees, whereby the costumer is asked to pay an additional $10 to ensure the connection is stable enough to carry out VoIP activities. Such fees are nothing but coercion from the provider, in this case Shaw, to force the consumer to pay an extra $10 or use Shaw’s VoIP service.

Interestingly enough, both advocates for and against net neutrality word their campaigns as a fight for democracy and the freedom of the marketplace. The question one should naturally ask is whose democracy and whose freedom?

Those against the cause, such as U.S. Republican Senator for South Carolina Jim DeMint, say that NN just means government regulation would stop Cable and telephone companies to operate in a fair field of competition, forcing them to abandon their investment in the infrastructure that would offer the consumer the service it’s asking for.

On the other hand, Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Democracy, tells us that the debate is about “the internet starting to look a lot like cable companies (…) where a few players would control access and distribution of content.”

Art Brodsky, who works for Public Knowledge, a Washington D.C. based group that works on telecommunications and intellectual property issues, explains that the cable and telephone operators have framed the NN argument in terms of big players like them fighting against big internet companies like Yahoo or Google. However, he assures us that the fight is not about that. It is about the next Google or Yahoo, and ensuring the start-ups have the opportunity to take a chunk of the market and grow with it.

Background & Research
Save The Internet
A Guide to Net Neutrality for Google Users
Battle over "Net Neutrality" arrives in Canada (CBC) - Nov 2, 2006
What is Net Neutrality? (YouTube)
Keeping the Net Neutral