We should be worried about Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality. It has the sound of something important, but if you don’t fully comprehend it, you’re in good company. It’s worth taking a few minutes to absorb it and the changes happening around it.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted late last month to repeal regulations intended to ensure Net Neutrality remains a governing principle of the internet. Even though the dismantling won’t be directly applicable to Canadians — the CRTC has committed to protect and improve it in this country — the death of Net Neutrality will have an impact on everyone who uses the web.

Net Neutrality is intended to prevent internet service providers from discriminating against different kinds of traffic and content on the internet. The loss of those protections means that big ISPs (in the U.S. they are AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, in Canada they would be Bell, Cogeco and Rogers) can block any sites or content they don’t approve of. More importantly, perhaps, they will have the ability to “throttle” access to sites and content. If they own, sponsor, partner or approve of the content provider, they can speed up traffic. If they don’t approve they can slow it down, or stop it altogether.

So, let’s say a major social media site pays a lot of money to ISPs for preferential treatment. They benefit, while others who haven’t, or cannot, pay a premium don’t. Or a business startup wants to compete with established players on the web, but can’t afford the premium those players can pay.

Or messaging from one political party can be fast and easy to access while that from another, less favoured, party could languish.

From the individual user’s perspective, certain content could become difficult or impossible to view, unless you pay a premium. Everyone gets some degree of access, but only those who can afford it get full access. It’s one thing for individual companies, say media outlets, to charge for access to some or all of their content. But we’re talking about the entire internet here, which is a different thing entirely.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? Shouldn’t businesses be allowed to do business and make money operating on the web? Isn’t that free enterprise? But doesn’t this capitalism-rules environment mean that the internet is really controlled, if not outright owned, by the people who can afford it? There is huge public opposition to the changes in the U.S. But the FCC is now dominated by Trump Republicans, and they were successfully lobbied by the big ISPs to scrap Net Neutrality. Who is really being served here?

For now, we get to watch this from a comfortable distance, since our government won’t allow big ISPs and other major players (Facebook and Twitter included) to control the internet. But don’t kid yourself, the same thing could happen here. We should be wary.