Net Neutrality – End of Freedom?

The Internet will not become the cable industry.

• In a landmark ruling the US court of appeals has thrown out the FCC’s net neutrality rules meaning that speed could become the provenance of the highest bidder.
• The case was brought by Verizon, which has long been railing against the current regulatory environment, brought against the FCC.
• Net neutrality means that ISPs must treat all traffic equally and not discriminate or give priority to one stream over another for a fee.
• This creates an economic problem as Netflix, for example, takes up 32% of peak time traffic putting substantial strain on the network.
• While there is a strong case to make for making the network hogs pay more, it is fraught with danger.
• Ending net neutrality could easily turn the Internet into the cable industry where a few large companies, that can afford the fees, control all of the usable bandwidth stifling competition and innovation.
• The free Internet lobby is already jumping up and down like mad but I think that they are getting over excited.
• This is because the court has not rejected the FCCs case out of hand, but has objected to the way in which the FCC implemented the rules.
• This means that FCC can appeal the ruling as well as go back to the drawing board and work out a fairer way to regulate Internet traffic.
• The ideal solution will be one where the bandwidth hogs have to pay something for holding up the traffic of others but without squeezing the little guys out of the market.
• An unregulated Internet is bad because the companies that provide the packets need to make money and without restrictions the fears of the free Internet lobby are likely to come true.
• Hence I suspect that the end of result of this bombshell will not be the end of the Internet as we know it.
• Instead there is likely to be a new set of regulations that takes into account that some services require faster speed and hog all of the bandwidth, while protecting the openness and freedom of this critical medium.
• I do not expect to see ISP’s throttling services that don’t make them money like Skype and YouTube.
• Furthermore, the fact that the user will be the big loser in this Orwellian future is likely to mean that the new regulations preserve the current status quo as well as making a few adjustments to the economics of packet provision.
• The winners here are the ISPs who will earn a slightly better return on their packets and the losers are the bandwidth hogs such as Netflix, Hulu and so on.