Net Neutrality is Free Market

While I do feel the late Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was treated a little unfairly by the webbernetting-meme-machine over his Internet as a “series of tubes” analogy, I also know that the anti-net neutrality advocate was extremely ignorant of how the Internet functions, as are almost the entirety of American politicians with their non-technical backgrounds. With the recent GOP takeover of Congress, I’ve seen numerous articles speculating on the death of Net Neutrality, but I fear it was dead no matter who controlled the government.

Allowing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to discriminate against network traffic with a tiered system would be a disaster of epic proportions for everyone who uses the Internet world wide. If you understand the architecture of the Internet, you understand that the preferential treatment of network traffic would quickly escalate beyond short-sighted offenses such as Cox Communications and Comcast blocking BitTorrent use into an arms race of ISPs undermining one another’s traffic. The elimination of Net Neutrality will quickly lead to a full-blown communications war.

What Americans and politicians don’t understand is that their personal ISP is not the only thing bringing them online services. Look at what happens when I use a visual trace tool to show the path of connections between my location and Google:

Google Trace Route

My connection to Google had to go through 19 locations and across approximately 5,821 miles. See number 11 on the map? That’s where the connection tried to go through one of Comcast’s routers, but couldn’t, and had to be redirected through another path along the network. That’s normal functioning for routers, which are dynamically calculating the best routes along the network for data packets all the time. Sometimes when I access Google the trace route will run all the way out to Europe and back to the United States to make a connection, a completely normal operation.

My ISP is Time Warner Cable, but that company only represents the starting point on this map. As you can see, my connection to Google requires seven ISPs to complete:

Google Trace Route

The problem is that most Americans and Politicians see ISPs as no different than cable carriers or satellite TV companies, providing access directly to the Internet and all that exists on it by themselves. ISPs are simply content providers in this view. What the public doesn’t conceptualize is that it is the network that makes the Internet spectacular, not the content. It’s the ability to send and receive packets of information, and no single ISP has the right to claim they are providing this service, because it takes hundreds of ISPs all over the world, not just the one you are paying, to bring you the World Wide Web, email, and smartphone apps. When you understand the architecture of the Internet as a collection of thousands of ISPs all working in concert to forward one another’s’ packets along the network, you see that these entities are much more like common carriers than content providers.

ISPs want the right to charge companies like Google extra for allowing its packets to travel across their network in what’s known as the two-tiered plan for the Internet. ISPs would get income from us for allowing us to access the Internet, and they would get income from Google, Amazon, and Facebook for letting the content those companies provide reach us. This is an additional cost to what these companies are already paying simply to make their content available on the Internet. It costs me a monthly fee to have this blog hosted, making it available online, and the ISPs want me to pay them extra if I want my hosted content to reach their subscribers.

How are all the different ISPs involved going between here and there going to manage a tiered system? Will every one of them charge Google a fee? Or will they join forces, forming a cartel to have their networks discriminate against companies that don’t pay? Companies lobbying against Net Neutrality conveniently don’t mention this part of the equation for obvious reasons.

ACM in Iran Trace
9,967 Miles in 12 Hops
Runs through United States, Netherlands, German, and Iran

The most infuriating aspect of the Net Neutrality debate is that the same free market ideology that has argued for free trade among nations as the best strategy is now arguing that allowing free trade on the Internet is bad for business. The world markets are a network, no different than the Internet. Allowing companies to implement charges against certain types of network traffic is no different than countries implementing tariffs against certain types of imports or subsidies of certain exports. The practice can quickly devolve into trade wars, like the Airbus-Boeing subsidy war and the recent tariff wars between telecoms in Kenya.

Allowing ISPs to charge at both ends of the connection will inevitably result in communications wars between network providers, which will require first lawyers and then multiple governments to step in to resolve disputes between companies and the countries hosting them. What will be the result? Regulations, a regulations nightmare a million times worse than the American interstate tax system, with its multiplicity of levy rules for each state, or the international trade system, and its hundreds of thousands of customs laws dictating what can cross borders.

Alternatively, we can have one regulation: Net Neutrality. Keep the Internet open, free, and fair. It really is that simple.