Worried about the loss of Net Neutrality? Let’s look at the history. I did after I first heard about the loss of Net Neutrality and was surprised after thinking about it. Net Neutrality never became a rule until 2015. Most of it’s enforcement actions were caused not by purposeful throttling or blocking, but by “speed lanes” and “crashes” caused by new technology flooding parts of the internet with traffic in excess of capacity. New apps using poorly designed data compression protocols flooded parts of the internet and when it crashed they sued to blame the ISPs. “Speed lanes” were put in by ISPs to allow business critical communications to get a priority over normal internet traffic. In essence, that card swipe at the register was given priority over your download of “Orange is the New Black” and maybe made it take .2-.3 seconds longer to buffer. End of the world stuff here. That long of buffering and people will just give up the internet and go running back to the cable and dish providers.
Back in the early to mid 90’s, we had ISPs when the internet first started that throttled this website over that one or tried to piecemeal off the net and charge you for each “service”. They wanted $X for mail, $X for ftp, $X for http. This was long before Net Nuetrality. It was before Google and social media and the internet as we know it today existed. Know what happened? Their customers left. They went broke. Or their customers started cancelling in such droves that they relented to not go broke with the equipment costs they were already out. There was once a nationwide dial-up internet provider which depended on add-ons to drive up their prices. They routinely blocked “non-favored” providers which competed with their for pay services. Ironically they shutdown today, the same day that the Net Neutrality that opposed their whole buisiness plan died. Who am I talking about? AOL.
Remember early cell phones? It used to cost over a $1 per minute. There were no “unlimited” plans. But the cell phone companies figured out how to make cheaper handsets and that they had lots of underutilized capacity. They figured out they could make more charging 10,000,000 people under $75 a month than charging 10,000 people $500 plus a month. Today, cell phones provide service to almost everyone. At much cheaper prices than traditional land lines. Indeed, the only thing propping up land line providers today is that they are also, ISPs.
Customers will be what keeps ISPs in line. They can’t risk losing the one revenue stream they have left. They have customers who like Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO, CBS On Demand, etc. Each of these customers is vested in their favorite shows. ISPs know from experience of the 1990’s, if they try to nickle and dime you to death to get your internet fix, you will find a competitor who can fill your needs and probably for less. They know with changing technology, you are paying them more for a service you could probably go and get from somewhere else better, faster AND cheaper. They don’t want to give you the excuse to suffer through the inconvenience of changing.
Right now for internet providers, you have a vast array of choices: old school local LECs, old school Long Distance Companies, Dish providers, Cable companies, and Cell phone providers. You can buy a WiFi router that connects to the cell phone networks and gives you data for any device. If the provider sucks, it’s pay as you go, so you can just try a different provider next. In the smallest markets you have at LEAST two providers who will try to underbid the other to get your money. It’s a buyers market. All Net Neutrality was preventing was ATT saying, hey, if you use your internet at home for work, we can charge you $X a month and guarantee that we will make sure your bandwidth has priority. Or other innovative services such as this. You think wired providers are going to give up their one selling point over wireless and cell providers? That one selling point is no throttling.
The internet started in the mid 1980’s. It had around 30 years of life before Net Neutrality. Only 2 years of life under Net Neutrality. I think the internet will do just fine. The wailing and gnashing of teeth about loss of the freedom of the internet has happened before. It happened when newspapers’ online presences and other content providers started going behind pay walls. It happened when various states started trying to tax internet sales. It happened when the Federal Government started going after online child porn and sex trafficking purveyors. It happened with Napster’s demise due to copyright infringement lawsuits. All of these were called, “the death knell for the internet”.
The net didn’t die. It evolved. Social networks were born. Technology and mechanisms were invented to enforce copyrights on peer to peer and other networks. Cloud computing, online AI’s and other innovations continued to happen and reshape the internet. Facebook and social media platforms are right now evolving mechanisms and technology to prioritize content they display according to “truthfulness” or your personal “trust” level. The only guarantee is that two years from now, the internet will look nothing like the one we have today. Just as today’s internet looks nothing like the one we had just two meager years ago.
Net Neutrality is just one of the “fads” that passed through the internet’s long life. I doubt we seriously miss it. Not now that I took the time to actually educate myself as to what it was.
