The Net Neutrality Debate and Its Unintended Consequences

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The next speaker at WebSci '09 is Alison Powell, and she focusses on the debate around net neutrality and the behaviour of net neutrality lobbies in this context. The debate stems from a US court ruling classifying Internet services as information rather than communication services, which eliminated the requirement of common carriage - ISPs would now be able to privilege certain types of traffic or slow down others. This became a major public debate during 2006 and 2007, driven in part by the 'Save the Internet' coalition backed by Google.

Network infrastructure, then, became a site of political interest for more stakeholders - while code is law, it need not remain this way if sufficient political momentum can be built up. Net neutrality turned into a consumer rights and free speech issue, and the end of common carriage was also seen as heralding the end of end-to-end architecture, converged ownership of content and carriage, a throttling of bandwidth and blocking of services, and a problem with the transparency of pricing - and it ended up combining politics on the Web with politics off the Web.

Eventually, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act was passed in the US, and adopted to substantial degree the language of the pro-net neutrality campaign. There was no comparable push in the European Union, however, and the rhetoric of 'freedom of speech' which is prevalent in the US does not apply here; instead, the European Commission applied a competition law framework to support net neutrality at least in broad terms. These approaches can be usefully contrasted.

What are the unintended consequences of such laws, however? Alison suggests that the politicisation of net neutrality as a free speech issue may be problematic - an 'all bits are equal' approach may result in telecom companies becoming no more than bit transmitters, resulting in a decline in investment, while a prioritisation of the provider's own content may lead to the creation of several walled gardens (similar to cable TV).

There are also likely impacts on the next generation of computing and networking, such as cloud computing, the grid, and the Web of the future. A lack of net neutrality could make such services very difficult to design, while the use of alternative networks outside the conventional Internet by the Web creates its own problems - how much does net neutrality apply to these networks, too?

This is ultimately a question about where power resides in the network infrastructure, and how this connects with other forms of power - media power, economic power, political power. The balance between openness and control needs to extend beyond a specification of neutral bit transfer, and should include broader considerations of power. More stakeholders than ever are involved in Internet regulation, and much is at stake for access to information, communication, and social life.

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