Don't Neuter the Net

While President Obama fights for the survival of his biggest campaign promise—health-care reform—he’s found it easier to make good on another: net neutrality. On Monday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new regulations that would prevent Internet service providers from discriminating against web traffic based on its content. We welcome this effort to preserve the open nature of the Internet, which has made the web such a boon to entrepreneurship and free speech.

Streaming video websites like YouTube would have been unthinkable in the days of dial-up Internet because the network couldn’t handle the data flow—or bandwidth—required to transfer clips. With the advent of broadband and subsequent improvements to network infrastructure, bandwidth-intensive websites like YouTube have boomed in popularity. The increased carrying capacity of the Internet has opened up a world of possibilities, from video chatting with your mom on Skype to Nigerian medical students observing surgeries in the U.S.

Increased bandwidth use is good for the public, but it’s a headache for Internet providers. Because most broadband services offer their customers unlimited bandwidth, there is no incentive for users to shy away from file-sharing, Skyping, and other bandwidth-hogging behavior. To continue offering unlimited access at the same speed, ISPs must find ways to either expand their capacity or discourage high bandwidth use. One of the solutions has been to decrease the download speeds of customers trying to use high-bandwith websites. Last year, the FCC chastised Comcast for deliberately slowing down BitTorrent, a file-sharing application, without telling its customers.

Allowing ISPs to choose which Internet activities get priority has several worrying implications. It could lead to anti-competitive behavior by ISPs, many of which also provide services that compete with new Internet tools. For example, Comcast has been widely accused of slowing the traffic of Vonage, an Internet phone service that competes with Comcast’s own similar service. (The two companies have since agreed to cooperate.) If ISPs are allowed to discriminate against content providers, they will do so in their own interests—if Comcast ever wanted to launch its own video streaming site, it could slow down YouTube to cripple the competition.

Others fear that ISPs could start charging high-bandwidth websites for access to the “fast lane,” slowing down smaller websites that can’t afford to pay. This would be a blow to the level playing field that has allowed entrepreneurs to create online empires from humble beginnings in a garage or basement, perhaps explaining why Internet giants like Google and Amazon are among net neutrality’s strongest proponents. What would your life today be like if someone told Mark Zuckerberg that his new “Facebook” site was using too much bandwidth?

We recognize that ISPs must find ways to ration their limited bandwidth effectively; however, this is still possible without picking the Internet’s winners and losers. Cell-phone providers charge talkative people more money, but they don’t charge based on who they’re talking to. Similarly, ISPs could charge users for the amount of bandwidth they consume, as long as they treat all Internet use equally. When ISPs start deciding which sites reach the masses and which don’t—no matter the criteria—they distort the marketplace of ideas and stifle the spirit of equality that has helped the Internet shape our world.