The Next Big Battle in Internet Policy

Former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens famously observed the the Internet is a "series of tubes"

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

For two years, network neutrality, the nation?s most high-profile and contentious Internet policy conflict has taken a backseat to other debates?privacy investigations by the Federal Trade Commission, cybersecurity orders from the White House, proposed copyright legislation like SOPA and PIPA, software patents in courts, and censorship abroad. After nearly a decade of (rarely productive) debate, net neutrality?restrictions on Internet service providers to ensure consumers experience freedom online?has rarely been in the news since early 2011.

But that quiet won?t last much longer. We have merely been in an extended intermission, and soon we will watch the third act in this play unfold. At stake is access to the mobile Internet on the handhelds and tablets in our pockets?as well as access by the chips increasingly embedded in our clothes, toasters, and heart monitors.

Act I: Dial-up, from Internet?s birth to circa 2005

Network neutrality is a proposed legal principle that would prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or slowing down access to certain websites and online software. The idea is simple: Internet users should be able to choose where to go online and which applications to use. Comcast, say, shouldn?t be allowed to block Skype just because it could siphon the communications giant?s telephone business.

During the Act I of the network neutrality play, policy debate concerned dial-up Internet services and was confined to lawyers and computer scientists. In the early 1990s, Americans used their home phone lines to connect their desktop computers to the Internet via ISPs like AOL, Earthlink, or Netzero. Back then, the ISPs didn?t have cost-effective technology to select particular sites for blocking or privileging. Plus, even if the most popular services?say, AOL?wanted to block some sites, users could switch to other ISPs, and AOL would lose business. Though government rules required phone companies to complete dial-up calls to anyone?your mom or your ISP?it was primarily market choice that ensured de facto network neutrality.

Act II: High-Speed Broadband, 2005-2010

Here, the battle moved from dial-up services to always-on, high-speed broadband Internet service. The phone companies introduced DSL, a new technology that provided higher speeds than dial-up and didn?t tie up a home phone line. Then cable companies, which had previously only offered TV service through their lines, put new technologies into their systems to offer access to the Internet that was far faster than both dial-up and DSL. But, with these new technologies, users couldn?t just place phone calls to dial-up providers like Earthlink and Juno. A phone company, like Verizon, would generally offer one ISP on their DSL line?their own. Same with cable companies?these days, your ISP probably isn?t Earthlink, it?s Comcast or Time Warner Cable. In a series of orders from 2003 to 2005, the FCC ruled that neither cable companies nor phone companies had to allow users to choose independent ISPs. And in another body blow to network neutrality, technologies were created to help the phone and cable companies block or discriminate against specific websites.

A few months after these FCC decisions liberated the cable and phone execs from potential competition, the CEO of what eventually became AT&T told Businessweek that it was ?nuts? for Google, Yahoo, or any other company to use his ?pipes? for ?free? without paying him and making a special deal with his company. That quote kicked off a multiyear debate featuring: failed legislation in 2006 (as a consolation prize, this gave us the hearing at which the late Sen. Ted Stevens famously observed that the Internet is not a dump truck but a ?series of tubes?); the Federal Communications Commission dinging Comcast for secretly blocking BitTorrent transmissions; and a major federal court decision to adopt network neutrality policies, among other things.

In December 2010, after seven years of debate, the FCC adopted a network neutrality rule.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=1bccd701e26add888f0903422fb8bf9d

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