Network Neutrality
“...network neutrality... makes the internet serviceable in our vision of PCs as democracy amplifiers and as tools that empower their individual users.”
author: Marlin Ouverson
posted: 30 October 2009; added letter to FCC: 8 Jan 2010
Copyright © 2009, 2010 by Marlin Ouverson. All rights reserved.
Personal computers, as I have mentioned elsewhere, can be democracy amplifiers in a very immediate and personal way. Not just PCs, but the infrastructure that includes loads of information, stored in a multitude of locations, and the means to deliver, make sense of and share that information in various ways.
Letter to the Chairman and Commissioners1
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), U.S.A.
Chairman Genachowski:
I was the paid editor and de facto wordsmith for a group that was in [some small] part responsible for making "personal computers" what they are today. In their vision, as I understood it, PCs would serve as a powerful tool that could help to level society's playing field and in many ways lessen, or make less powerful, the stranglehold of poverty, lack of education and class distinction.
I believe network neutrality to be a required factor in a democratic, digital age. Its legal status should be rightly understood as inextricably related to freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to assemble. In every meaningful way it shares the attributes of those freedoms, which we champion and cherish.
We should similarly protect network neutrality, and continue to educate ourselves and others to its importance.
Thank you,
Marlin Ouverson
former editor for People's Computer Company
publications Dr. Dobb's Journal and
Recreational Computing
E-mailed on 8 January 2010 via forms at the FCC web site, e.g.:
http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/genachowski/mail.html
or, for links to every commissioner's contact info and online forms:
http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners
Even without the internet, no PC is an island, for it connects with the world via its users and peripherals. Still, the PC with an internet connection is today’s most vivid and visible demonstration that people with unobstructed access to multiple sources of information are more likely to compare, evaluate and filter those sources. This makes them better informed and increases their opportunities to practice critical thinking, not just to observe but to participate in ad hoc public debates and to base some of their life decisions in the rich compost of plurality and collective forethought and feedback.
More than merely consuming information, people increasingly publish their own contributions to the global store of knowledge (and opinion and folklore). Take a step back and notice how active, public participation makes a net culture, or groups of cultures, and how the interrelated systems change and evolve. For the internet is yet young and has been evolving since its inception — not only the content it serves, but the structure and all its underpinnings. Human beings continue to make decisions about it that affect all of us, that determine how the information pipelines work.
If we think of those people at all, it probably is with an out-of-my-league, defer-to-their-judgment attitude. We assume their decisions are well informed, are in our best interest and are impartially fair. And it appears our faith usually is justified, though it might be asking much from faceless people whose names we do not know.
“Human beings continue to make decisions about [the global network] that affect all of us, that determine how the information pipelines work … it appears our faith [in them] usually is justified, though it might be asking much from faceless people whose names we do not know.”
The once-silent majority might become quite vocal if their freedom of information is denied, no matter whether the data they seek is mundane, ridiculous or life changing. Not many users care about packet switching and protocols, but plenty of them will care very much if they learn their provider is filtering (i.e., censoring) certain content: make a certain social network unavailable or deny equal access to an online maps-and-directions service and they may rise to action.
Thus we encounter the principle of network neutrality. Loosely speaking, this asserts that anyone’s request for information over the internet is as important as anyone else’s request, and that nothing in the infrastructure will treat some resources as more important or more accessible than others. This rather simple premise drives engineering decisions, financial concerns, political debate and philosophical discussion. It is what makes the internet so serviceable in our vision of PCs as democracy amplifiers and as tools that empower their individual users regardless of those users’ unique environments and backgrounds.
The Price of Admission
“Traditional barriers to full participation in society, such as race, class, gender and age, are irrelevant and are largely ignored or invisible. There are members-only zones and self-serving interests, but people largely come and go as they wish, with the cost of admission usually not more than providing their e-mail address. The cost of exercising free speech online has become negligible with the development of web applications and business models that support free blogs and social networks, for example.”
Re-read any early book about the new information society, remember what we hoped it would accomplish even before they started calling it the information superhighway. Not all that long before the internet, buying a set of encyclopedias for the family was an investment that many purchased in oft-difficult installments for their children's futures. (We browsed ours for fun, like video games, and sometimes for quality time with dad, foraging together, thirsty for facts of no immediate consequence but that gave flesh to the far horizons in our heads.) Or go back two or three lifespans, imagine life with no library nearby and few or no personal books. Letters were a rarity, often kept tucked away, prized. We are now living, to some degree, the life that visionaries were forecasting and shaping a scant few decades ago. Deus ex machina: suddenly there is an internet cafe in Lhasa, Tibet!
Free speech and free access to information are two complementary sides of the new coin of the realm. But we forget this has not always been the natural order, that a hard-won and partly serendipitous series of events led to today's freedom of access to information, and to an immensely magnified power to broadcast our own words across the world. Some nations have realized that if the access to this technology were not equally accessible to all its people, greater disparities would erupt in their populations. The economically challenged, if access to information required money, would fall farther behind the rest of the population while, in fact, they are the most in need of getting onto the common playing field.
Some nations have begun legislating freedom of information for their citizenry and specifically support free speech on the internet. Finland had the foresight to tackle the thorny issue of mandating a mininum transmission speed. Realizing that lack of high-bandwidth connections can be a handicap in some circumstances, it became the first nation to "declare broadband Internet access a legal right."
The USA does not lead the fight for freedom of access to information, but its FCC has expressed the intention to do so.1 Commercial and political opponents of a net neutrality act have launched campaigns whose slogans tell us the internet must be saved from such government legislation. But failure to enact laws securing net neutrality would mean providers could selectively limit content, unduly restrict bandwith and otherwise limit, filter or deny information services based on ability to pay and other, more-arbitrary factors. In a normal service-as-commodity business model, that might make sense. But when we come to understand the power of information and regard it as a fundamental human right, we must apply different, more-noble and less-commercial standards to it, as we do for freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence and the freedom to assemble, for example.
The United Nations goes so far as to state that freedom of access to information is a basic human right:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
That this Declaration was adopted in 1948 does not detract from the contemporary work of the United Nations specifically in defense of freedom of information for all people. In fact, the world stage at the time in which the UDHR was drafted must have sharply underscored why the free flow of information must never be impeded.
Interests who are more concerned with profit2 might make decisions that, perhaps unintentionally, erode the foundations of network neutrality as greatly as parties with overtly personal, political, financial or religious agendas might do so willfully. For example, AOL is reported to have, at one time, blocked e-mails whose content included the web domain name of a group opposed to its pricing plans. In another case, a telcom giant is said to have blocked text messages related to an anti-abortion issue, even those sent to someone who had asked to receive those messages.3
Still, providers and law-enforcement authorities would like a way to legally restrict, for example, peer-to-peer networks used to distribute pirated copies of copyrighted materials, including music, software and movies. And whether or not hate speech is a protected right in your country, as a lamentable but legal exercise of free speech, the principles as they pertain to the internet must be divined and encoded in law, with the awareness that the eyes of the world truly are on these situations more than ever was possible before the digital age.
“If we only ensure the democratic foundations of network neutrality, our descendants can build upon them.”
Striking this delicate balance is not impossible, it is not even an unfamiliar task.4 A legal code must develop to define the broad issues, then legal processes shaped by that code can evolve to address the hair-splitting arguments that will ensue. We do not have to address all such issues at once, we even can leave that work to others. If we only ensure the democratic foundations of network neutrality, our descendants can build upon them.
Most of the internet is wide-open terrain whose fruits are available to anyone with an internet connection. Traditional barriers to full participation in society, like race, class, gender and age, are irrelevant and are largely ignored or invisible. There are members-only zones and self-serving interests, but people largely come and go as they wish, with the cost of admission usually free or not more than providing an e-mail address. The cost of exercising free speech online has become negligible with the development of web applications and business models that support free blogs and social networks, for example.
We have come to rely on network neutrality without being consciously aware of what it is. It is fundamental to the internet as we know it, as we collectively have envisioned it, and it is as fragile as any instrument of democracy and human freedom. It asserts that among our essential human rights are both freedom of expression and the freedom of information, and neither shall be restricted for any reason.
1. We note with gravity the concern expressed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that the USA's FCC does not have explicit regulatory authority over the internet, although it may claim such auhority as part of its ancillary jurisdiction. EFF urges great caution over allowing the FCC to act in this particular way, stating, "'net neutrality' might very well come to be remembered as the Trojan Horse that allowed the FCC take over the Internet."
2. Consumers might understand why their internet service provider (ISP) would want to charge extra to stream large-format, high-definition video over the internet, even though that path probably leads to monthly ISP charges akin to traditional utility fees, based on amount consumed, and perhaps like a telephone bill with time-of-day and day-of-week rate escalators.
3. These and other examples, including some involving corporate giants like Comcast, AOL and Verizon, can be found at the Wikipedia page about data discrimination.
4. For example, the European Union has adopted wording that attempts to allow containment of illegal activity while still protecting the democratic principles embodied in internet neutrality as a governing philosophy.
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