Why Should an Agency Care About Net Neutrality?

Net Neutrality is something of a nebulous concept. For those unfamiliar, here's the gist: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are common carriers, just like the telephone company. Being a common carrier means that in exchange for legal immunity for the things your customers may do (downloading illicit videos and music is the most common example) while using your services, you agree not to discriminate against any customer's traffic. Telephone companies are common carriers; if a bank robber uses a Verizon cell phone to orchestrate a robbery, Verizon can't be held accountable for that. If someone uses FedEx to deliver illicit materials, FedEx can't be held accountable. In exchange, FedEx agrees to offer its services to the public without discrimination. Most public transportation carriers fall under the common carrier umbrella. The basic idea is that the public at large can use your services without having to worry about discrimination, and you get immunity for any actions an individual might take. You remain liable for the safe delivery of any such cargo (packages, data packets, telephone calls), but you are excused from any liability caused by the cargo itself.

The common carrier concept is particularly important in the realm of ISPs, because ISPs direct the majority of today's information traffic. When you punch "www.offmadisonave.com" into your web browser, it sends a request down the pipe to your ISP, whose job it is to direct this request to the computer responsible for serving the content. That computer is almost certainly on a different network with bandwidth provided by a different ISP, and normally that request will pass through any number of ISPs on the way to its destination. When your request reaches the ISP responsible for connecting said computer, it directs the request to the computer itself. The response (the actual blog page you want to see, along with its associated data) then takes a similar path back to you. The entire process is designed to be seamless (for the most part) because ISPs have established agreements for interconnectivity. There might be dozens of hops between two computers, with each hop potentially visiting another ISP. The system works in concert because - as common carriers - these ISPs have the duty of passing along any request without discrimination. To put it more simply: the Internet as a whole works because ISPs agree to transport your cargo - data packets - without discrimination. Each person who wants to access the Internet does so by connecting through an ISP. Each company that wants to post content online pays an ISP for bandwidth to serve that content. That's an important distinction. You pay your ISP for access to the whole Internet, and we're able to interact with one another because each of us does so. I must stress this point: You are able to read this blog because 1: You pay an ISP for a connection to the Internet, and 2: so do we.

That poses a problem when one of the ISPs along the way decides it doesn't want to play by the rules. This was most poignantly brought to light in November of 2005 when Ed Whitacre, the CEO of AT&T, made some statements that draw this relationship into question. Talking about Google, he stated that "what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it." Mr. Whitacre is implying that Google owes AT&T money because AT&T's pipes (network lines) are sometimes used to carry data for Google. This flies in the face of the entire premise upon which the Internet was built. AT&T's customers pay AT&T for an Internet connection, just as Google pays for its connections, so traffic should be able to freely move from one end to the other. Perhaps most unsettling, his stance is popular among the various players that sit atop the world's ISPs, and this is but one example of how opponents to network neutrality are positioning themselves. Other examples include prohibiting, delaying, or otherwise impeding certain kinds of traffic.

Just two weeks ago it was made public that Comcast is actively fighting BitTorrent traffic, as well as traffic generated by Lotus Notes (a groupware client). Aside from being an absolute PR disaster, Comcast might have shot net neutrality opponents in their collective foot. The net neutrality debate is something that many people had thought was over, and this recent revelation has brought it back in a powerful way.

At this point you might be asking why a marketing agency cares so much about seemingly technical details, but the truth of the matter is that every single individual with any interest in the Internet's very survival should be concerned. Think about all of the Internet traffic you consume and generate on a daily basis. That includes everything from the emails we send and receive to YouTube clips to iTunes music to this very web page and more. Imagine receiving a bill from your ISP and seeing fees for visiting Google (instead of your ISP's preferred search provider), or using Skype. The Skype example is really interesting, as we've seen examples of ISPs that offer VoIP services blocking competing services (Vonage seems particularly susceptible). Imagine having to pay your ISP a fee to be able to send more than 100 emails a month, or a fee to access international web sites. Instead of the current model, where you pay for a connection to the Internet, many ISPs would instead like charge you for every little thing you do online. Every single one of these scenarios is a possibility if net neutrality opponents have their way, and that's why we at Off Madison Ave are so concerned.

A large part of what we do is help our clients establish and utilize a strong web presence. Sometimes that means building award-winning web sites. Other times it might mean creating awesome emails that turn lists into buying customers. At no point in this process do we ever have to consider which ISP an end-user might be using, nor is there a cost associated with the answer to that question. We don't have to tell our clients that it will cost them an additional $X to ensure that all ISPs will deliver any of this content. We don't have to tell our clients that sending email to Comcast customers is more expensive than those using Cox. We certainly don't have to ask our clients to come up with a budget to cover the fees associated with guaranteeing that customers of all ISPs will be able to reach yourspiffydomain.com. We care about net neutrality because it matters for our clients. It matters for us.

This is a complex debate, to be sure, and I personally shy away from government interference with a matter the free market should be able to decide. The difficulty with the free-market approach is that our choices for broadband these days are very, very limited. Off Madison Ave is located in Tempe, which is in the heart of the Phoenix metro area - an area of roughly 4 million people. How many options do we have for broadband? Two: DSL through "the phone company" (Qwest), and cable internet through "the cable company" (Cox). This is the situation for the majority of people across the country. When your options are so few in number, it becomes precarious to trust that competition alone can solve this problem. It isn't our place to say that legislation is the answer, but we'd be crazy not to have an opinion on the topic itself. If your company has any kind of web presence or any interest in being able to use the Internet freely to conduct business, this is an issue with which you should be concerned.

For additional reading on the topic, Wikipedia's articles on Common Carriers and Net Neutrality should get you started. The previously linked articles on Ars Technica are worthwhile, too. If you've seen enough and would like to throw your weight behind net neutrality, check out MoveOn.org's Save The Internet campaign.

About the Author: Joseph Jaramillo

Joseph Jaramillo is Off Madison Ave's Senior Technologist, and leads our app development team. He's been building applications for over a decade, and specializes in the Ruby on Rails web framework and iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) mobile platform.

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