Net Neutrality – What’s it about

16th August, 2010 By Guy Hoogewerf

This month I wanted to bring to your attention something a little different, but something that may well affect all of us deeply in the future. It may or may not matter, but you are going to hear about it a lot in the coming years.

Net Neutrality

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the ‘hypertext’ link on a web page it revolutionised what would be called the Internet. Tim Berners Lee then went on to found the WWW Council, a loose organisation that decides the general rules of the Internet.

The first and foremost rule was that ALL traffic on the Internet should be treated equally. It specified that no organisation, company, government or other should have preference on the Internet.

Quite literally a website containing a downloadable Disney film should have the same rights as you putting some of your photos online, or the speed of a university research website should be the same as a news website or government one, or any other.

The concept was a ‘level’ playing field for all. Meaning that you would be rated on your content – not you ability to pay a premium.

All this is now under threat, as large businesses are starting to ask – ‘if we pay can our content not appear faster’ – or perhaps more succinctly – ‘if our customer pay to have things faster can we not deliver that’.

The Pros are obvious enough – if you want your home cinema to be controlled by your mobile phone and to allow a ‘pay-per-view’ movie to be downloaded on said home cinema in a matter of 5 minutes or so, then why not pay the £10 it may cost. You get things faster and you’re happy to pay for it.

But the Cons are on a little digging infinitely worse.

You’ll have to pay extra to get that faster speed, something that does not happen now, so using the internet will be more expensive.
Large companies will benefit because they can afford to have their content take precedence over small competitors – this really will be a case of if you pay you get.
Small companies will find it harder to make an impression on the Internet (my statistic of 80% of people ‘web time’ is spent on just 20 websites will get much much worst)
Google and search engines will give precedence to faster loading websites, they already do.
The have/have not divide will get worst, as things that cost us westerners money will be unavailable to people that cannot afford the costs.

So Net Neutrality is about ensuring that the Internet remains a level playing field enabling anyone to compete fairly regardless of company or organisational size. Literally if you want to complete against Amazon, Facebook or Google you can – in the future you might not be able to do so, without significantly more money.

In the News

At the moment Google and Verizion (the worlds largest Media company) have made a agreement that largely dictates to the US government, that wireline (normal Broadband) should be treated different to Mobile Internet, but this is the very thin end of the wedge.

Currently there is no software that can give preference for one website over another… but as soon as the ability to differentiate Internet traffic exists it will be a matter of time someone decides to pay for it and to get their services delivered fast.

An example could YouTube – we can upload a video today and it will be played accordingly… but what if our video took twice as long to download and watch that say a Disney movie. The natural progression for people would be to watch the Disney movie, leaving our video in the backwaters somewhere.

So – you now know a little more, I hope next time you red about Net Neutrality in the newspapers you’ll think of your website and realise the implications it might have on your business, especially if your website took much longer than say the Disney website to download.

Comments

comments