Sage Spencer: August 2010

Please do not offer the world an opportunity to kick our internet ass!

I have just read a post on The Huffington Post indicating that Tea Partiers wish to abandon network neutrality and that they have inexplicably called network neutrality

“an affront to free speech and free markets."

This post began as a comment to that article but due to length has turned into a blog post.

Dear Tea Partiers and all others who wish to abandon network neutrality:

Network neutrality is not an affront to free speech and free markets. It is in fact quite the opposite. Network Neutrality is a communication principle that allows for an INCREASE in the exercise of free speech and is a principle that makes markets FREER. Anyone who has told you differently is not telling you the truth.

Network Neutrality is not something new.

Network Neutrality is also not a plot by the present government or any other government to control us in any way.

Network Neutrality is a communication principle that the Net has been operating under since its inception.

This communication principle allows you and me, the internet users, to be treated as equals when we use the internet…one of us may be paying for temporary access at a public internet café while the other may have a dedicated computer room in a house with a fourteen car garage. Network Neutrality means that my traffic on the internet is not more or less important than yours.

It is the same principle that another communications tool has operated under since before my great gran was born. That other communications tool would be the telephone. This principle guarantees that when I phone my great gran, my telephone company does not get to discriminate against my call going through before my neighbour’s does…because they happen not to appreciate my great gran protesting their investment in blood diamonds, outside their company headquarters each week. Network Neutrality, as a general rule, disallows discriminatory or preferential treatment of communications. A Canadian internet example of a corporation being non-neutral can be read here: Telus Blocks Consumer Access to Labour Union Web Site and Filters an Additional 766 Unrelated Sites

Recently, two large corporations, Google and Verizon, have banded together, in what some might call an internet mafia, in order to devise a new set of rules that they would like to see the internet function by. They have decided that they no longer want to operate under the Network Neutrality communication principle that the Net has been operating under until now, and they would like to abandon this communication principle... for wireless communications and other yet to be determined “new services”.

Presently, YOU the internet user get to decide what you see on the internet; you the user have that FREEDOM and that POWER. Abandoning Net Neutrality transfers that freedom and power from YOU to the CORPORATION.

If we the internet users were to lose Network Neutrality, then a few large corporations would gain certain opportunities to control us for profit. We would be giving up a freedom and power we presently enjoy and then agreeing to pay a corporation in the future in order to exercise that freedom, in whatever way they choose to allow us exercise it.

Profits are a great thing. Business is the engine of the economy. Both of those do not mean that what Google and Verizon are asking for is in your best interests or the best interests of businesses… other than their own.

Yes, in the short term, abandoning Network Neutrality creates the potential opportunity of profits for a few large corporations. In the long term, it will create a very different internet than the one that has existed until now. Abandoning Network Neutrality will create an internet with less competition and less innovation, both of which are bad for business… unless you are a monopoly or near monopoly. It will also offer other countries who retain the freer markets that Network Neutrality provides the opportunity to kick our internet ass.

If you are voting to abandon Network Neutrality then know that you are voting to abandon the free market principle of a level playing field. When we play against each other on the soccer field both our teams get to field 11 players. We don’t know who will win but we agree to play by the same rules. Network Neutrality has created a level playing field on the internet which has fuelled new businesses. Network Neutrality is great for competition, innovation and new business.

By voting to abandon Network Neutrality, you are also voting to allow a few large corporations to make short term profits at the expense of long term competition, innovation and business development on and of the internet.

We must thoughtfully consider whether enforceable rules are necessary to allow for the continuation of this level playing field that has created successful businesses originating in garages, homes, dorm rooms and basements?

The Internet will soon become as much a necessity as the telephone before it. It is in the public’s best interest to think seriously about Network Neutrality at this point in time. Two large corporations are proposing abandoning it on wireless, which is the future of the internet, therefore defacto abandoning it. This decision involves, at the very least, questions of freedom of expression, questions of access to a technology that will soon be as fundamental as the telephone and questions of fair business competition.