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A few thoughts about Net Neutrality

Just a week before the FCC holds a vote on whether to apply fairness rules to some of the nation’s internet service providers, two companies that sell their services to the country’s largest cellular companies showed off a different vision of the future: one where you’ll have to pay extra to watch YouTube or use Facebook.The companies, Allot Communications and Openet — suppliers to large wireless companies including AT&T and Verizon — showed off a new product in a web seminar Tuesday, which included aPowerPoint presentation (1.5-MB .pdf) that was sent to Wired by a trusted source.

The idea? Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix. For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube. But traffic to Vodafone’s services would be free, allowing the mobile carrier to create video services that could undercut NetFlix on price.

Most people won’t care about this until they start actually having to pay and by then, it will be too late. (via soupsoup)

People seem to have this Home Team mentality, they hate Congress except their senator, they hate regulation except when a oil pipe explodes, or a mine collapses, or a levee breaks in their state, they hate government spending except when it funds public works (and jobs) in their state… people are selfish and shortsighted, which is not very cool, but understandable.

This is a Home Team issue for everyone! The internet is where we publish content, create art, do business, interact and collaborate with each other, share news, and discuss all things digital and analog. The internet is where we exist in the present and future, it’s the final frontier of democratic and open communication, and we’re handing control of this future over to telecommunications companies who have anything but our best interests in mind.

Telecoms make credit card and pharmaceutical companies look like non-profit organizations, and with this they will own (and regulate) every stream of information that you access with a mobile device. In the short term, that means charging a premium for content not based on its bandwidth but on its perceived value to consumers. An analogy is charging a base price for gasoline, but charging a premium to use that gasoline to drive to work, another to drive to a social gathering with friends, an exceptional charge if you’re using that gasoline to drive to a hospital for an emergency - the cost is inelastic because at timesyou need to drive to the hospital (or a lesser extant, to work and social gatherings) regardless of the cost. You can choose to take your business to another gas station but as Anthony mentioned in an email conversation earlier today, this is predicated on collusion between all providers, so the illusion of competition exists but really a handful of companies have created an oligopoly with the understanding that if any one sets these unfair terms of use, they all must so that we as consumers have no reasonable alternative. This kind of collusion is in practice among commercial flight - in a attempt to squeeze every modicum of revenue from the consumers one company limits the number of bags you can check for free, the next charges a fee for any checked baggage, another builds on this by charging not only for checked baggage but for carry-on… then snacks… then drinks… until it is taken to an absurdist conclusion of one airline considering a fee to use the lavatory. This is done under the guise of creating a streamline product that can be tailored to best fit each customer, but is never reflected in lower baseline service fees.

That’s just the most apparent effect, severity of this [lack of] regulation is clearer when looking at the motivation of internet providers. This this ruling gives providers control of not only the cost of transportation but much more deviously, control of your destination. Returning to the analogy of the gasoline that you purchase to drive to the hospital, what if the company had a corporate partner that provided medical services - a hospital that may not be the most affordable, may not be the closest or the best, or maybe just is not the one you prefer, but because it has partnered with the transportation providers, it’s the only one you can access. This ruling allows ISPs (mobile internet service providers) to make the decision on which “hospitals” it wishes to arrive at, which content it wishes to provide, and that content will NOT be based on the will of the public, but rather on the companies with the best partnerships. The “theaters” where you can (and cannot) see video, the “venues” where you can (and cannot) hear music, the ability to navigate to a store, to see a friend’s photos, to find news, these decisions will no longer be made by consumers but by providers, and to serve their best interests.

Sites where netizens share video, music, and news may seem non-critical, but media corporations are steadily sinking and are ready to vie for the preferred (and eventually the sole) bandwidth of mISPs. This is a form of capitalism, where products no longer serve the needs of consumers, but rather the needs of corporate partners who are able to stifle competition by removing competitive options. But again, this is just money, consider a more nefarious implementation where a pharmaceutical companies pay mISPs to only provide their corporate fact sheets for medication, to close all roads to sites that provide objective or critical information about drugs that are being figuratively forced down consumers throats via tv, radio, and internet promotion as well as doctors who have become NASCAR-like in their decal-covered promotion of Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, et. al.

These are just a few examples of “revenue streams” for mobile ISPs and they are not some apocalyptic doomsday scenario, they are drawn directly from the current business plans of telecommunication companies. And there’s no super villain twirling his moustache and plotting global domination, this issue is all about money, and we’re all part of it.

Which brings us back to the Home Team mentality, a team we’re all on, all in together. This is a mine that’s going to collapse, a levee that’s going to crumble, a pipe that’s going to burst, a bank that’s going to squeeze every penny they can from the the public before turning around with a hand out to the government because they’re too big to fail. I can see the headline now, “A Hundred Million Americans Left Without Telephone Service As AT&T Faces Bankruptcy, Goverment Must Act Now to Avoid Catastrophe!”

But before we reach that point, consider this: Without net neutrality in 2010, how much would we know about man-made disasters - specifically the mine collapse in West Virginia, or the oil spill in the Gulf - if the companies responsible for them(Massey Energy and BP) were able to buy control of internet news sources and information streams from ISPs?

(Source: Wired)

1 year ago  /  209 notes  /  Source: