Commentary: Net Neutrality – An Update, a Misnomer, and (Possibly) a Better Way
Initially this model worked just fine, as end users accessed the internet primarily for email and web browsing, consuming data in small chunks and for only a limited time each day. In today’s world of streaming video, peer-to-peer file-sharing, and more, these same users are beginning to leverage their broadband connections for much bigger workloads, which has increased network operators’ costs and eaten into their profit margins. [For a more in-depth look into these issues, read AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson’s May 14 article ]
This new usage paradigm has led telcos to push for their right to offer tiered access in order to generate sufficient revenue to justify their network buildout. And the truth of the matter is that large-scale investment in next-gen networks can’t be supported solely by getting consumers to pay bigger bucks for more bandwidth.
Today’s users, by and large, won’t pony up for a 20, 30, or 50Mbps connection. What’ll drive their demand for more bandwidth are applications that demand that level of connectivity, which has us in a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg situation where next-gen networks need these applications to drive demand for bandwidth while the applications need the next-gen networks to work in the first place.
Though the two-tiered internet is much maligned—after all, it invokes the specter of network operators playing the role of gatekeepers for consumers’ access to content and services—there’s another angle to consider, as described by former Congressman and current Verizon EVP for public affairs, Tom Tauke, in a recent BusinessWeek interview . "So let’s say, for example, that you’ve purchased 5Mbps of service, and you are a gamer. And the XYZ gaming company develops a new game that needs 25Mbps of service. They could come to you as a consumer of their products and say: ‘Go to Verizon and buy 25Mbps.’ Or they could come to Verizon and say: ‘When he logs on, we want you to up the speed so that he will get 25Mbps,’" Tauke explains
The advantage of this model is that consumers are able to buy bandwidth as it relates to specific applications rather than having to shoulder the costs of maintaining a sufficiently large connection on a monthly basis even though they rarely have need for this higher level of access.
During this transition period when next-gen networks are being deployed, saddling network operators with restrictions regarding how they can recoup their investment while simultaneously forcing individual consumers to pay for sufficient bandwidth to enable next-gen applications rather than simply rolling the cost for incremental bandwidth into the price of those services seems like an unwise approach for nurturing the continuing evolution of last-mile connectivity and high-bandwidth IP-based applications and services.
A Misleading, Muddled Misnomer
Perhaps the biggest misnomer of this whole debate is the term "net neutrality" itself, or to be more precise, the ambiguousness of the word "net".
When you think "net neutrality" do you mean network neutrality or internet neutrality? If you look through most coverage of this topic, the two are used interchangeably, but that shouldn’t be the case. Local- and wide-area networks and the larger internet are not the same thing. A network is a specific set of pipes owned by a particular company or institution. The internet is the virtual environment created by every network that accesses it and is owned by no single entity.
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