The Scene staff
Maybe you have heard about the threat to net neutrality in the last few weeks, but what is net neutrality and why does it matter?
Net neutrality is the principle that an Internet service provider, like Charter or Verizon, can’t give preferential treatment to any website. Whether it’s Twitter or a small, niche website, the consumer gets the same connection speed.
Without net neutrality, there is nothing to stop someone from trading pay-offs for faster service. Recently, providers have suggested doing away with net neutrality, but this could be the death of Internet as we know it.
If a website has a slower connection than one of its competitors, it’s been proven that consumers are more likely to choose the faster alternative. Even a 400-millisecond delay is enough to deter use of a website, according to analysis by Google engineers.
This means getting rid of net neutrality would kill the free market component of the Internet.
Imagine what would have happened if there had been no net neutrality in the mid-2000s, when Facebook overtook MySpace as the dominant social-media website, if MySpace had been faster than Facebook because of preferential treatment from big Internet service providers.
I’m afraid we would have been staring at the terrible HTML layouts of MySpace for a few more years.
Also consider what would happen to the next person with a revolutionary website idea and a substantial amount of money to put it into action. Without the right connections with Internet service providers, this person would be unlikely to execute his or her idea because of the new barriers to entry.
Website innovation would suffer, but the consumer would arguably take an even larger hit.
Let’s say Netflix has much faster service than the video-streaming site Hulu, and as a result, Hulu loses subscribers and advertisers slowly. Hulu could go out of business, and then the consumer would have far less entertainment from which to choose.
Finally, one of the worst prospective scenarios in doing away with net neutrality is the possibility of the Internet being sold in the same fashion as cable-subscription packages. Websites could be sold in bundles, with the cheapest bundle limited to basics such as email and news websites and with more expensive bundles including popular and specialized websites.
Worse yet, this system might force consumers to pay for a bundle with 10 websites they don’t care about just to access one. This is the most extreme example of how a lack of regulation could change the Internet for the worse, but it’s not completely far-fetched.
The net-neutrality court case is being decided by the U.S Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The crux of the issue deals with how Internet service providers are classified and how much they should be regulated.
Providers now are classified as “information services,” ensuring less regulation. President Obama campaigned to protect net neutrality and made an unsuccessful effort to change the classification to “telecom services.” This would have allowed more strict regulation, like the enforcement of net neutrality.
Attempts to change the classification were difficult, so rather than reclassifying Internet service providers, the Federal Communications Commission ignored the law. It chose to loosely interpret current statute, allowing it strict regulation.
According to the Washington Post, judges who heard the case in September seemed resistant to the FCCs decision. The D.C. court will have its answer this year or early next year.
Even if the court overrules the FCC decision, the case could be appealed and heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Another option for the FCC is to yet again attempt to reclassify Internet service providers as telecom services.
Hopefully, with the combined efforts of pro-neutrality politicians and activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press, the Internet can continue to function openly and freely.