Net neutrality is one of the most controversial and complex issues on web surfers’ agenda nowadays. What will happen if it’s repealed? This article highlights the fundamentals of this principle and answers the question Why should I care?
What makes net neutrality so important?
The issue of net neutrality is everybody’s concern. The odd thing is that many users are clueless about it and don’t have their own opinion regarding the uses for net neutrality on the Internet. This fact poses a serious hurdle to an in-depth discussion of the matter. The approach in question is currently at risk of repeal, which will affect all of us in one way or another.
Zooming in, net neutrality is a concept revolving around the principle of a Common carrier that, among other things, spans communication systems. The term common carrier denotes any organisation or business entity that indiscriminately provides the whole range of its services, including communication and data transfer, to everyone interested. It presupposes that all users should have the same scope of access to communication networks and receive/send data without any restrictions as long as they can afford for the service.
Simply put, Internet service providers (ISPs) and state regulatory bodies are supposed to treat all data transmitted by users via the Internet in an unbiased way, that is, irrespective of the user’s identity, type of content, platform, application, and communication methods. It means that all users should have equal access to the network and, ideally, pay the same price for an unobstructed connection regardless of the network usage goals.
This has been a long-running idea, but it wasn’t until 2008 that it became the talk of the town. This milestone was all about the scandal around Comcast, where the company was accused of limiting bandwidth for those using BitTorrent protocols. In case you didn’t know, BitTorrent is an immensely popular file sharing service that allows transferring all sorts of digital content, including multimedia, which requires high bandwidth. Ultimately, there was a great deal of controversy in the verdict ensuing from this investigation. Comcast underwent criticism but wasn’t actually found guilty, and the problem gave birth to a debate that’s still underway.
There are two different facets of this matter: the perspective of Internet users, on the one hand; and that of Internet service providers, on the other.
The benefits and caveats of net neutrality
Quite a few governments, including the U.S., follow the practice of regulating the Internet in the state’s interest. This tactic allows them to control the range of services ISPs can provide. The problem is that different users’ online activity patterns deviate a lot in terms of the amount of data as well as the required connection speeds and bandwidth. Consequently, ensuring equal access may end up being an unfair approach in the long run.
One of the motivations for ISPs to limit the traffic is purely technical and boils down to preventing network failures. The amount of data streaming through their systems tends to fluctuate and varies throughout the day as well as during certain days or even months. In the morning, when people wake up, the traffic consumption increases, then it grows dramatically as the work day begins and goes down in the evening when everyone is returning home from work. In some periods during the day, the traffic is low, and connection speeds are high, while in others on the contrary the traffic volume is high and the speeds are lower. In case the amount of traffic gets too hefty, the ISP may run into difficulties keeping their operational parameters on a consistently high level. This will slow down the buffering for streaming multimedia and may even disrupt the entire network, causing outages for millions of users.
One more stumbling block, from the consumer’s perspective, is that ISPs could impose higher fees for better and more versatile services if they didn’t have to comply with the net neutrality principle. Discriminatory pricing is believed to contradict the very essence of the Internet, which is viewed by many as a public commodity although its underlying infrastructure is private for the most part.
It makes sense to differentiate the extent of net neutrality’s importance for regular users and for businesses. The ways of using the Internet are undoubtedly the same, but the range of use cases goes far beyond receiving emails and paying bills. Internet-based businesses make money from stable web traffic. If the download speeds are low and other online limitations are in place, these enterprises will fall short of income, because users would rather go to a different site than wait for the content to load.
Nearly 50% of all Internet users expect sites to load in two seconds or less, and as little as an extra second of load time makes the bounce rate increase by 7% or more. Therefore, it’s in every Internet business’ best interest to make sure there are no limitations on the ISP’s end.
What are the factors that put net neutrality at risk?
Data caps
A data cap denotes a limit of the amount of data you can transfer within a specified period of time. In other words, you get disconnected once you reach your limit, regardless of the connection speed. In some cases, you may be allowed to exceed the limit and continue surfing the web for an extra fee. The ISP may also offer you to switch to a more expensive data plan with a higher cap.
Bandwidth throttling
This one is a practice of reducing connection speeds for individuals or organisations regardless of the amount of data they transfer. ISPs can slow down the speeds throughout the network to thwart overloads, or they can apply to throttle to specific customers, thereby pressuring them into upgrading to costlier premium services. This tactic usually zeroes in on bandwidth-heavy services, including streaming media, online video games and file sharing portals.
Packet shaping
Also known as traffic shaping, this mechanism is a form of throttling that targets a specific type of data rather than a user or organisation. To make it work, an Internet service provider leverages a system that checks whether the incoming and outbound traffic correlates with the data packet profile if it doesn’t, then it slows down or gets blocked altogether. This means ISPs can throttle all streaming videos rather than the ones provided by a specific streaming content service, which tends to slow down all incoming traffic.
The advocates of net neutrality want cable companies to be subject to the same rules as commonplace service providers and oblige them to allow all ISPs to access their cable networks. This way, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) could enforce common carrier guidelines, similarly to how it’s currently done with remote access services, and prevent cable companies from tampering with online traffic streams unless they have the right court order.
There is, however, one method to ensure net neutrality in your own way it’s called virtual private network. From the net neutrality perspective, the benefit of using VPN for torrenting, for example, is that, while being able to see an active connection, the ISP cannot identify the sender and recipient of the data. Therefore, the provider cannot limit your data usage, throttle your bandwidth and get additional profit for so-called premium services. If all Internet users were connected to VPNs, the debates on net neutrality would become pointless.
In fact, net neutrality is merely one of the capabilities delivered by a VPN. Its fundamental feature comes down security. This technology was originally meant to protect the most important and sensitive governmental and corporate data being transferred over the Internet. Things have changed, and VPN technology has now become the main IT security mechanism of every Internet user.