The Need for the Persistence of Net Neutrality

September 2, 2014

If you have thoughts or feelings on net neutrality, please email your comments to [email protected]. Visit the FCC’s website to learn more about the New Inbox for Open Internet Comments!

My comments and concerns about the topic continue below!

There is a clear presence of telecommunications oligarchy within the United States. With limited competition from locality-provided telecommunication services, as well as tele-giants’ natural advantage from huge financial and lobby powers, these conglomerates receive advantages that make entering the telecommunications market in the present day near-impossible. As such it is important that, in the spirit of anti-trust regulation, select service providers of online content are not coerced into paying additional fees or facing limited bandwidth connections between their services and the consumers they provide to. Service providers such as Netflix have limited means by which to ensure consistent content coverage without the cooperation of ISPs, and negotiations are skewed in favor of the internet access providers.

In addition to this, the public-cloud structure that is increasingly prevalent on the web, like Rackspace hosting or Amazon Web Services, on which large organizations’ resources masquerade as the service provider for smaller organizations, the number of end-to-end routes for data connections grow limited. Rather than having thousands of service providers running hosting platforms, web content is routed through the servers of few. Whether or not this is to remain a sustainable model is to be seen, adding yet another reason to not limit developments through legislative means.

In either case and in example, service disruption could occur even to Amazon customers whom are providing bandwidth-heavy hosting services in the case that non-neutral ISPs decide to charge higher fees to the bandwidth-hungry providers. If Amazon does not subsidize bandwidth costs to their customers, or absorb these additional charges, an ISP may choose to block access to resources entirely, or provide near non-functional access speeds, until cost disputes are resolved. This would result in a chaotic gray-area of legal battles, where plaintiffs argue that they are only middlemen who are not responsible for content delivery, and therefore not responsible for ISP costs.

The internet is an infrastructure used by the military, local, state, and federal governments, students, educators, and anyone with a means to access and use it. Although not officially recognized as such, it is irresponsible for any individual to fail to admit that it is a critical systems infrastructure in modern civilizations that will only continue to enhance all disciplines and areas of life. By keeping it neutral, we can ensure access to all resources, equally. High speed data lanes will only lead to service discrimination, and possible violations of rights. Without internet content, an internet service provider is nothing but an empty well.