Who owns the internet? Providers who pay to maintain it, consumers who pay to connect to it or content companies whose services depend on it

Theinternetisasetof pipes.It’salso a set of values. Whose? The people who consider it a great social equaliser, a playing field that has to be level? Or the ones who own the network and consider themselves best qualified to manage it? It’s a philosophical contest fought under the banner of “net neutrality,” a slogan that inspires rhetorical devotion but eludes precise definition. Broadly, it means everything on the internet should be equally accessible—that the internet should be a place where great ideas compete on equal ter ms with big money. Even in the contentious arena of net neutrality, that’s a principle everybody claims to honour. Interpreting it turned into a different story.

The situation

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided in February 2015 to impose more government oversight of broadband traffic; its regulations were upheld by a federal court in June 2016. Internet service providers will now be treated as public utilities. The FCC will have authority to bar service providers like Comcast and Verizon from charging content providers like Netflix for preferential treatment, and from blocking or slowing web traffic. The rules also, for the first time, apply open-internet protections to wireless services for tablets and smartphones. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said the agency would not seek to regulate pricing. Both the gover nment and internet service companies, which fought the new rules, said they wanted an open internet and “net neutrality,” an idea also embraced by other countries with widely varying definitions of the principle. In February 2016, India ruled that mobile operators cannot charge different rates to different parts of the web, which ended Facebook’s offer of a Free Basics service that would have allowed no-cost access to its social networking site and a limited number of other sites.

The background

The term “network neutrality” was coined in 2002 by Tim Wu, a law professor and author. He argued that no authority should be able to decide what kind of information was and wasn’t allowed on the internet. But Wu also recognised the expenseof maintainingnetworkhardware, so he proposed that providers should be allowed to charge based on usage. People would pay for more bandwidth, not for access to certain sites. In 2005, the FCC released a statement turning Wu’s principles into policies. When Comcast interfered with access to web networks that used a lot of bandwidth and enabled trading of pirated content, the FCC baulked in 2008. Comcast sued, and won. The FCC set new rules and Verizon then challenged them, winning in a US court in early 2014. That’s what started the latest round of rule-making. The FCC tried again with the rules passed last year.

The argument

US President Barack Obama had sided with web activists and tech companies like Netflix; the court’s ruling handed him a big victory. Supporters had said with internet use and related costs rising fast, the FCC needed this power to force a shrinking handful of powerful internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally. Republicans had sided with internet providers who said that more regulation deters investment in a better inter net. Opponents had also challenged the FCC’s legal right to upend the old regulatory framework that was in place as companies spent billions of dollars to build high-speed internet networks. Beneath the legal and policy questions lies a philosophical one: Who owns the inter net? Providers who pay to maintain it? Consumers who pay to connect to it? Content companies whose services depend on it? Who balances their competing interests? Bloomberg