Net Neutrality, and Why We Should Embrace and Fear It.

Net Neutrality is the name that has been given to the political belief that the internet should treat all data as equal. Equality has a special place in American hearts as it is one of the core beliefs of democracy, that all votes are equal and that all citizens get an equal say in how the country is run. Net Neutrality also has deep roots in the free speech. Because when you stymy data, you are in essence thwarting communication, and in an era where a vast majority of that communication is made over the internet, efforts by internet providers to choke off certain types of internet communications strikes many as a direct affront to their free speech and free association rights. While the internet may not be a traditional avenue for political communications, it is fast becoming the most popular means to exchange political opinions.

With the internet taking such an important roll in the modern world, it was inevitable that world governments want to get involved. Internationally there is great tension over who gets to control the internet. In China, and other totalitarian regimes, there is a great desire to control and censor speech in order to control the hearts and minds of its citizens. The command and control aspects of content censorship are quite obvious, which is why China and others have enacted large internet censorship and intelligence surveillance programs. With the US government signalling that it wishes to globalize DNS services instead of giving exclusive rights to the non-profit ICANN, the vultures of the world, as well as the angels, have been circling to get a piece of the action when it becomes available. If global DNS becomes nationalized, it would give governments greater power to block content providers they don't like and further censor and spy on internet communications.

In the US, the current debate focuses not only on the NSA's surveillance of the internet, but on the right of internet providers like Comcast to prioritize information transferred over their networks. Obama has recently urged the Federal Communications Commission to take control of the US internet, like it has over radio, television, wire and satellite communications, and make the internet a public utility regulated by the FCC. Under FCC proposed rules, ISPs would not be allowed to prioritize internet communications, de facto imposing net neutrality on ISPs. Obviously, companies like Comcast are against this as they have invested a large amount of time and effort into creating their internet empires and they do not like government imposing its will on them. They also don't like the government blocking off the potentially lucrative business practice of charging more to large data users and throttling the internet speeds of those who refuse to pay for more bandwidth. Ever since Comcast purposely choked Netflix's bandwidth in order to extort fees from the content provider, Comcast has been looking to expand this practice towards other large providers like Google.

So, on the surface, Net Neutrality looks like a boon to the end user. It keeps companies like Comcast from choking or censoring their content while still allowing them an avenue to make money, by charging the end user for access. For the service provider, it looks bad because it is choking a potential revenue stream and creating a new regulatory scheme which will add additional compliance costs on the business. These additional costs and regulatory constraints will use up resources better spent on expanding advanced networks. The problem that I see here is that the belief that government is a benevolent stakeholder in internet communications whose control should be embraced over that of the greedy corporation is incredibly naive. As I noted above, surveillance and censorship of the internet is of great interest to all governments of the world as a means of controlling their citizens. Moreover, when a government controls a resource, one of the ways it pays for this control is by imposing additional taxes. After all, it is tax dollars that pay the salaries of the government workers who oversee compliance with regulations. If the choice in the Net Neutrality debate is between governments who want to spy on or censor their citizens and tax internet communications or ISPs that want to prioritize the web and charge more for large data users, then the citizenry is faced with a real devil's bargain. And this is why we should both embrace and fear government enforcement of net neutrality.