Net Neutrality?
June 10th, 2006
The Internet is one of the most important inventions of modern times. It completely changed the way people access information, communicate, do business, and even get entertained.
In the last decade I have progressed from knowing little about what the internet was, to relying on it for many aspects of my life. Nearly all of the news I get, I read online. I stay in touch with many of my friends and family through sites like myspace, or facebook. At work, nearly everything is done through e-mail. When I need to do research for a class, or even to lookup something that wasn’t explained well in class, or in the book, I turn to the internet. I want to listen to music, or AIM hide….the internet.
What makes the internet so useful? How did it grow so quickly, and gain such popularity. There are many reasons, but I believe one of the major reasons was its “neutrality.” Whoever you are, wherever you are, you were equal to everyone else. Once you got on the internet, whether it was via dial-up, or a T1 line, you were only limited by the bandwidth of your connection. Anyone could design a website, and anyone could view it. It didn’t matter if you were Microsoft or a kid in middle school.
Recently, this “neutrality” has been threatened. The major ISP’s like AT&T, Verizon, and MCI want to charge for higher priority service. This means companies like google, who have lots of cash to throw around, could pay AT&T to prioritize any google traffic, over all other traffic. If Yahoo chose not to pay for this added priority, all google searches could potentially be much faster than yahoo searches.
Currently, when a user wants to access a web page, the users web browser will send a request to, say google.com. This request is transmitted in the form of a “packet.” A packet is analogous to a letter, it has a destenation IP address, as well as a return address on the outside. Inside it contains whatever data the application wants to send to the web server (google.com), in this case a request for googles home page. This “packet” is then trasferred to through the internet, through a series of wires and routers. The path the packet takes to get to its destination can be decribed like driving from one place to another. First the packet will travel within your local area, analagous to driving city streets. If the packet must go to another area (or city), it will have to hope on the highway. This highway, the internet backbone, is essentially a super fast, super high-bandwith network, which handles essentially all the worlds traffic. It is owned and operated by a few large ISP’s such as AT&T and Verizon. These big ISP’s charge other ISP’s(like AOL, earthlink, or even other big ISP’s) to allow them access to this internet backbone. The packet will then make its way back to a smaller local network, and finally to google.com where google will process the packet and send the webpage back to the user via a similar path.
So right now, here is how the internet is paid for. You pay Earthlink for your DSL, Earthlink pays AT&T, Verizon and a few other big ISP’s to allow them access to the internet backbone. On the other side, Google pays AOL (just fo the sake of the example) to hook them up to the internet with a whole lot of bandwidth, and AOL pays the big ISP’s for access to the internet backbone. So everyone pays to access the internet, but the ammount you pay is based soley on
the ammount of bandwidth you want.
The way this could end up working in the future is you pay Earthlink for your DSL, and Earthlink pays AT&T for access to the internet backbone. Same thing. Google pays AOL to give it a ton of bandwidth, and AOL pays AT&T for access to the backbone. But, now google also pays AT&T to make sure that any traffic going to or from google.com gets first priority over any other traffic. This means if you were trying to access Yahoo.com instead, you could be stuck waiting until there is no google traffic before your packet will make it to yahoo.
This might not have made much sense, but essentially big internet companies would be paying more money to the big ISP’s to get preferetial treatment, and smaller websites would not be able to pay for this prioritization. As a result, smaller websites would not be able to service their users, and would have to shut down.
The big ISP’s argue that allowing the preferential treatment will help the building of new technologies, such as VoIP and TVoIP(TV over IP), but in reality will stop the individual innovation that built the internet in the first place. This is very similar to the way Wal-Mart has taken over. It has the money, and resources to be able to reduce prices, thus attracking more customers, and running smaller stores out of buisiness. If something is not done, the internet as we no it will not exist, instead it is going to be nothing more than a few large, commercial, sites like Google, AOL, and Microsoft.
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