According to WSJ, the federal government will use ancient rules designed for phone networks to regulate broadband lines. This is only the beginning of a huge battle, putting broadband Internet providers and phone companies against Silicon Valley and the consumer.
Net neutrality sounds like such a boring topic, but it’s very important to so many different groups of people that it bears paying attention to. The basic principle is whether high-speed Internet providers can treat some traffic different than other traffic or whether they must take a completely neutral stance and treat everything the same. Other issues include regulations on broadband rates, which could affect what companies are able to charge you. Digging even deeper are regulations on the actual broadband lines and how that would affect a provider’s ability to do business.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowskih is the man behind the decision to push forward with this net neutrality initiative. He wants all traffic treated equally, with no specific traffic being slowed or blocked. Just last month, Comcast won a federal appeals court ruling against the FCC. While this threw into question whether the FCC even has the authority to enforce net neutrality, the ruling simply stated that they went about it the wrong way.
While there are strong opinions on both sides, what it boils down to is specifics. At this point, we don’t know exactly how the FCC will go about implementing net neutrality. Some say that such a plan could affect under served and underrepresented individuals like minorities and lower-income households, indirectly denying them access to the Internet. Others argue the exact opposite, saying that net neutrality will increase availability of broadband access to those same groups. It’s hard to know who to trust.
President Barrack Obama vowed to support some type of net neutrality and accepted donations from Silicon Valley. Bill Clinton says, “The question is how heavy a hand will the regulatory touch be. We don’t know yet, so the devil is in the details. The network operators have to be able to treat some traffic on the Internet different than other traffic—most people agree that web video is different than an email to grandma. You have to discriminate in some fashion.”
Telecom companies say regulations on pricing could scare away their share-holders. They are afraid that they might be forced to open up their broadband lines to competitors and that regulations could impeded their ability to keep up with the growing expansion and demand for broadband access.
There are many variables to consider here, but I think the most important outcome is how these changes will affect minority communities. It will be interesting to see exactly how the plan is layed out.