Net Neutrality

The FCC has taken its first steps toward regulating the ISPs in favor of net neutrality. The important thing to remember is that net neutrality is pure propaganda. It is the reduction of a very complex issue to two emotionally significant words. This is not an issue of ISPs versus consumers. It is an issue of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) versus ICPs (Internet Content Providers). The net neutrality supporters are fond of telling people that fast lanes will run Mama B's online cupcake business off of the Internet. That, to use a technical term, is complete bullshit. Comcast is a big corporation. NetFlix is also a big corporation.

Where the fast lanes come in to play is in the case of consumers of huge amounts of bandwidth, like NetFlix, Amazon, Google, and others. The ISPs want to charge them more because they are the entities that drive the expansion and increased maintenance of the Internet infrastructure. Without net neutrality, the result would be that your NetFlix subscription would go up, or your Amazon Prime would cost more. In the end, if you didn't want to pay more, you would drop your subscription. NetFlix and Amazon know this, and they don't want to swallow the increased cost of access, so they have started bitching to the FCC and created the whole net neutrality kerfuffle. Google took the high road and just decided to build out their own infrastructure. They have more money than God, so it wasn't a tough decision for them. If the ISPs can't differentiate bandwidth like that, then they have to distribute the cost of maintaining the infrastructure across everyone. That means your access will cost more even though you don't use more, or, even worse, they will meter your usage. By the way, the technical name for the fast lanes is speed tiers, but that isn't nearly as emotional.

ISPs already cost differentiate bandwidth for consumers. They always have. That's no different than any other service of that kind. You pay more for electricity if you use more, same with gas and water. Where ISPs give a good deal is that once you pay your monthly fee, they don't care how much you use. The cost of bandwidth is evenly distributed across monthly fees. Some ISPs are talking about bandwidth throttling and usage limits, but those would be offered as low cost arrangements. For example, Time-Warner could offer a package like you get with your cell phone. I buy 10 GB of cellular data and never even use close to all of it. It's a bargain for me to buy that instead of an expensive unlimited plan for data I would never use. They are talking about throttling arrangements as well. You buy a bucket of data at a high speed bandwidth, and when you use up your bucket, you get throttled back to a lower bandwidth. If you want to accelerate again, you buy another bucket. One again, though, those would be offered up front as low cost subscriptions. Those plans are also useful for people who have terrible credit. They can prepay for a bucket of data and their credit rating is irrelevant. The net neutrality crowd wants you to believe that the ISPs will try to force you into those plans. Ask yourself, why in the world would they try to force you to pay less for your service?

Don't get me wrong. Time-Warner and Comcast are concentrated evil. They seem to spend more time figuring out subtle ways to screw their customers than any other company I've known. Their customer service motto seems to be, "Ha ha. Sucks to be you." That's why the net neutrality propaganda works so well. Everyone hates them already, so it's easy to believe that they will try to screw us over some more. However, the proof of this being a corporation vs. corporation scuffle is the fact that AT&T and Verizon are in the mix. They are competitors with Time-Warner and Comcast in the ISP world. The idea of Verizon and Comcast being in collusion is laughable. The idea of AT&T and Verizon being in collusion is even more laughable. What those carriers all have in common is that their infrastructure is accessed by consumers of gigantic amounts of bandwidth that don't want to pay more for it.

I don't really care about the cost issue and who pays it. I'll still use the services however they come. What I do care about is the FCC getting their foot in the door of regulating content on the Internet. There is already a long-standing hue and cry in favor of regulating porn. In case no one noticed, the political party that panders to that demographic just took control of the government. I also don't care whether there is porn on the Internet or not, but I don't want the government telling people that they can't get porn on the Internet. And, how far is it from telling you that you can't watch porn to telling you that you can't post a political opinion on Facebook? This move will also stifle innovation by the ISPs. If they are all regulated to the lowest common denominator, competition will essentially disappear, and they will have no incentive to create newer, better, faster services. As one friend put it, ask yourself why wired telephone carriers stopped innovating after the invention of the automatic switch. They were and are heavily regulated. There is no incentive for them to make anything but the least effort to keep the service running.

I wonder if John Oliver and Stephen Colbert will come back and acknowledge their ignorance after Comcast puts a meter on your Internet access, or when the government decides that they don't like what either of them is saying and shuts their YouTube channels off. They have lined up behind a cause they don't understand and they haven't thought about the consequences. Since they are on teevee, Joe Average figures that they must know what they are talking about and he lines up right behind them.

The sky isn't falling, but it's getting really cloudy out there in Internet land.