Wondering What All the 'Net Neutrality' Fuss is About? Watch This Video.

The Internet is not under threat at all. The fact of the matter is that “network neutrality” legislation and regulation are not necessary, because the market already keeps the Internet open. However, Google is keen on passing these laws and regulations because they go far beyond that. They not only would allow Google and other corporations to take services from ISPs without paying for them (for example, by setting up P2P servers on users’ computers); they would prevent a startup company from arising to challenge Google. What’s more, they would make Internet service more expensive, harm the quality of that service, reduce consumers’ choice of providers, and destroy jobs and businesses.

This is a corporate agenda — as one can see by the fact that Google mouthpiece Vint Cerf gets more face time in the video than anyone else. Don’t buy into it!

The only reason we haven’t seen more violations of NN in the market to date is that the threat of regulation hangs like a sword of Damocles over the marketplace. The shots across the bow have been shot down after detection and public outcry, but if the formal establishment of non-NN happens, there will be no cause to object, and customers will have nowhere else to go. The ISPs will jump over each other to rush to the bottom and NN will cease to exist in practice as well as de juris.

If we had regulation to keep the market genuinely competitive, then it’s possible that NN could emerge out of that. But the market is not competitive, for a variety of reasons, so we can’t rely on it.

Open access and data non-discrimination/common-carriage is what made the Internet as successful for innovation as it has been.

End users all pay for their bandwidth via their access contracts with their ISPs (or edge-cache-ing services or other backbone peering contracts), so there is no need to double-dip with other networks. The bandwidth is all paid for already.

Abandoning NN would stifle innovation by new startups, because they’d have higher barriers to entry as they’d have to pay brand new “protection money” to make sure their data is not hobbled by the end user’s network.

It would make the price of every Internet-based service higher, as those services pass through the toll costs to the consumers, and it would make all of those user markets less competitive as a result. That is what would destroy jobs and businesses.

Abandoning NN would create an incentive to maintain scarcity of bandwidth in order to prop up the value of the protection money/tolls, thus dis-incentivizing the investment in new bandwidth infrastructure.

And if you think any of these new tolls will get passed on to the ISP’s own end user customers, think again. This is only meant to prop up to ROI for the ISPs’ investors, who get first dibs on those profits. End users will probably see their fees increase anyway.

But most important of all, ISPs should not get the power to decide whose speech can propagate unfettered and whose cannot. It’s bad enough when a government censors speech, but it’s even worse when private actors with gatekeeper leverage start doing that without oversight.

If we give up NN, we give up the freedom of expression that is critical to maintaining democratic dynamics, and we yield control over the national nervous system to a few private powers who get to decide what our society can talk to itself about. This gives a few corporations the effective power of thought control over society, by controlling it expression and reflection.

Not acceptable. The Internet is now as critical as any public utility, and it demands common carriage to keep the playing field level.

Net neutrality is a public good that qualifies as a bonafide public right. For the health of our democracy, we must not relinquish it.

In fact, we shouldn’t even rely on just the FCC to make the rules (though the proposed rules are good). We need to write it into statute and get it fixed in place more permanently.

ISPs never have, and have never wanted to, censor legal content. Remember: providing access is what we’re all about. But if government steps in to regulate the Internet, you can bet that it’s going to regulate speech. Starting with the “Fairness Doctrine” that masquerades under the name “network neutrality.”