Net neutrality is only the beginning of an open internet

Net neutrality is the principle of making sure that your internet service provider doesn’t make it easier for you to access one service over another – the Guardian over the Telegraph, say – or otherwise distorting your use of internet services just because someone dropped a few extra quid in their pocket.

Yet in many ways, the current battle over net neutrality is less a question of broad, public-interest internet values, and more a parochial telecommunications policy war between US cable and content companies, waged on a global stage.

After more than a decade of wrangling, on 26 February an executive board of US telecommunications regulator the FCC will vote on a 322-page proposal, titled Preserving the Open Internet. Matters of deep principle are claimed to be at stake, but agreement on what those principles are is less forthcoming.

The internet is not unlimited

Nobody can object to aspirations such as neutrality, equality and openness. But each of these terms is also a conceit. The internet is not unlimited. Traffic management, in some form or another, is obligatory in shipping digital packets.

When you make a phone call, your voice is sampled maybe 50 times a second, and then reconstituted at the receiving end, with a minuscule delay to account for any network failings.

When you call up an internet application or website, that site or service is hurled at you, progressively increasing as many packets as the network can carry, unless something else gets in the way. If voice gets in the way, the application adapts. If it’s the other way around, voice drops out.

Network engineer Fred Baker uses this distinction between voice and web, or between “real-time” and “elastic” applications, to demonstrate one of the consequences of a rigid application of net neutrality rules. If everything must be treated equally, he argues, then nothing can be done about your voice line dropping. You are subject to the internet service provider’s best efforts – “passing your traffic to the enemy, and hoping for the best”. With voice, this is usually fine – we can cope with some small delay. With video and other data-rich streaming, it becomes more complicated.

Is there only one form of net neutrality?

In the first order, net neutrality is the Telegraph/Guardian example: ensuring that internet service companies don’t intentionally block or degrade access to legal content or services. At this level, there is little controversy. Rules against such practices are welcome, even if there is little evidence that it is a market problem requiring fixing.

One of the damaging side-effects, nevertheless, is that a crude assessment of legality could unfairly prevent the bulk of upstream traffic and a significant proportion of downstream traffic in many parts of the world that is comprised of peer-to-peer file sharing.

Second-order net neutrality is about the voice/web challenge – the detail of traffic management – and it’s much harder. In particular, there is a heated debate over paid prioritisation, or “fast lanes”, negotiated between ISPs and content providers. Here, the market is already active.

Streaming companies such as Netflix have complex “peering” arrangements with cable companies to fund good service and make up for some of the vast percentage of the cable traffic Netflix uses.

Another area where such arrangements are manifold is mobile, and the meat of the FCC proposal focuses on these issues. But it is not clear whether it is just about ensuring public-interest oversight of peering arrangements, or actually interfering with the arrangements that can be made. Either way, the US now seems to recognise that public regulation of bandwidth, to ensure the public interest is met, is the appropriate foundation for such regulation, bringing it into line with the rest of the world.

What this debate doesn’t solve

Net neutrality has been the central campaign point for a grassroots movement of internet activists in the US. It has an obvious bad guy in the fat cat cable companies, but it’s as much about the incredibly consolidated and monopolistic US telco landscape, and the geoeconomic aversion to internet regulation, as it is about wider, public interest internet issues.

The rather extraordinary thing is that over-the-top services – the content providers – have come off as the white knights. Just like artists and struggling musicians are the frontmen of the industry copyright lobby, here, start-ups and bloggers are the frontmen to the internet giants. In the end, however, we’re all small fish to Facebook, Google, Amazon and their kin.

Net neutrality is no panacea to walled gardens, tethering, transit providers that exploit exchange-point congestion, and content-delivery networks that outpace the speed of light in giving me access to Google and Amazon quicker than the Guardian or the Greek national library. Your access to a small newspaper or voice application, is slow not because of shady service provider deals, but because of the enormous network infrastructure and network entrenchment of its competitors.

We citizens, often derogated as “users” or “consumers”, have much to win in a global communication space. That is much more than simply a “neutral network”. Instead, it is a truly open, distributed network where everyone’s fundamental rights are respected. Not having our access providers acting as interested gatekeepers may be a step in the right direction, but it is by no means an end. Many other distortive factors remain and we will not have an open space until we get rid of them all.