Network Neutrality, in the shortest description, means absolute freedom for the consumer to access information and not be subjected to information control based on commercial or political reasons. I am strongly in favor of Net Neutrality.
In 2005, the Broadband Policy Statement was released by the FCC that essentially laid out the groundwork of how ISP's provide service. The statement emphasized legal web activities and competition among ISP's to provide fair and affordable coverage.
Comcast went against the policies of the 2005 FCC statement by essentially blackmailing video streaming site, "Level 3." In the Broadband Policy Statement is says, "customers should have access the lawful Internet content of their choice." Comcast wouldn't let it's customers access any of Level 3 unless the company coughed up more money.
Opponents of Net Neutrality argue that ISP's are buisnesses like any other, and if you don't want to contend with their policies, then don't buy their service. I counter this argument by saying that the internet is a new medium, and has only had roughly 20 years of mainstream attention, and in that time new problems have arisen that haven't been dealt with. It would be like if a phone company placed restriction on who you could call. Wouldn't it be fine then if a phone company placed restrictions on who you could call? What if you signed up for Vonage, but they had a deal with Pizza Hut to keep people from eating at Papa John's? You can't call Papa John's to place an order on their network, they make more money and control the flow of information.
To think that any major business would sacrifice customer satisfaction and fairness for money is absurd. An ISP can make more money if it restricts access to users on another ISP or using a commerical service that either directly, or indirectly affects their own profits. You are entitled to the speeds and accessibility that you pay for! "If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level." (1)
There are fewer restrictions regarding Quality of Service (QoS) restrictions for mobile internet providers, this is most likely the reason for those incessant ads on TV about 3G and 4G speeds, data caps, and service models. I still believe that ISP's should run their business to make a profit, thus ensuring quality service to the most amount of people. There is a difference between fair service models, and ones that gouge consumers at every opportunity with overage fees, sleazy buisness practices, and heavily inflated prices.
The ISP's are responsible for ensuring reliability. Your speed of access is not conditional, you are entitled to what you pay for, regardless of the provider's opinion of your usage. They should not be able to block, speed, up, or slow down data streams based on the content, i.e. youtube, netflix, or competing services on another network.
Net Neutrality means being free of commercially and politically fueled desires to control your access to the web. This is a major concern when deciding how to manage rampant piracy on the net. There are no such provision made on the federal level for internet censorship in America, though the rights of ISP to discriminate is debatable. The failed bills SOPA, and PIPA came close to breaking the open internet in the interest of decreased piracy. I feel that it is protected under the constitution to access any information that you want.
To that effect, I think the End User receiving data should be able to access any site, network, or server that is connected to the WWW regardless of content, or bandwidth, and operating within the confines of the legal and fair. Unfortunately, if people can get away with a crime, they will do it. The main opponents of the open internet are lawmakers and ISP's that want to curb piracy through Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), whereby they would monitor data streams to determine what sort of information is being sent/received. ISP's also want to use this information in order to create traffic rules and regulations for the sole reason of increasing profits. (2)
Telecommunications of any kind should be blind and anonymous. Though, the actual speed/bitrate of a consumer can still be monitored on the surface and remain anonymous, providing only clues to what the end user is accessing. While I think internet piracy is a major concern in terms of intellectual property rights, I don't think anyone should be able to take away your anonymity on the internet, just as no one should deprive you of your privacy while making a phone call or reading a book. Your anonymity, to not just your identity, but also what you're doing is important; as stated above, any information about what you do on the web and the technical characteristics of such can be used by your ISP to further commerical greed.
As it stands today, the authorities cannot monitor any telecommunication without a warrant obtained for reasons of reasonable suspicion. For the average end user of an ISP, 100 simultaneous connections downloading 20-100 Gigabytes is suspicious of piracy by means of a peer-to-peer (P2P) client. In cases like that, ISP's should be able to look at the packets being sent to ensure that they aren't contributing to software/media piracy, though not at their own discretion, for this could lead to a corrupt company making unfair exceptions and privileges for whomever they please. Remember, P2P is not in itself piracy, this technology has many useful legal functions, but it's also the main tool for acquiring stolen intellectual property. Since P2P technology doesn't rely on a central source to distribute data, but rather on every end user participating in the swarm to seed data as well as receive it, piracy is difficult to detect, masquerading as innocent data streams from one person to another. A .torrent file (the index of all the data in the original file) must be acquired prior to starting the download, so the P2P client knows how big it is, what pieces go where, and what the finished file will look like.
I propose a system by which a non-human entity is programmed to perform DPI without record or human interference. This would allow for "red flags" in which the monitoring system has detected a pattern, characteristic of illegal downloads, i.e. the same chunks of data making their way across the country to seemingly random End Users without any common location, time of access, or purpose. At this point, an actual human from the company may step in and perform DPI to determine what the data contains and whether legal intervention is required.
Net neutrality is the polar opposite to the internet situation in China, where the content-restrictions-bottleneck is intertwined with the government and not individual ISP's, this is done to control political information. SOPA/PIPA aims to allow the government to lock out entire domains that provide .torrent files describing stolen intellectual property, though it would effectively allow for the federal government to deny access to any source that it did not like. Besides, .torrent files are miniscule in size and could be transmitted by any means on the web, so these bills would be less than useless in curbing piracy, it would just make doing it a little more time-consuming for the pirate. It's a slippery slope though, as soon as the government has the power to cut off access wherever it wants, where do they stop? If people in Europe or other parts of the world publish anti-American sentiments, what's to stop the government from banning access? It gives too much discretion and power to the government and ISP's. Intellectual property theft doesn't fall under "freedom of speech," and SOPA/PIPA was never intended to squash your rights to read or write anything, but it's a slippery slope. Piracy is not freedom of speech, but Network neutrality is! Being able to visit any site you want without fear of reprisal is 100% protected under the First Amendment. Whether or not you choose to act on that information in an illegal way however is a crime, and is not protected in the slightest. It's just like if you walked into a library and checked out a book on bomb-making. You should have the right to read about arson to your hearts content, but that doesn't mean it's ok to start making pipe bombs in your basement.
Keep the net free! (Free as in freedom)
We really need a nationwide mesh network :/ free information for all!
(1) http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144
(2) http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/07/Deep-packet-inspection-meets-net-neutrality.ars/2 [last paragraph]
Really too bad that no one commented on this great posting! As always I appreciate the thought you put into these and the high degree of writing you post!
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