Thoughts on Big Comms and Net Neutrality

I'm sure that many of you have heard about the bill going through Congress which will effectively end Net Neutrality.

For those who aren't sure, Net Neutrality is the theory that all traffic on the Internet have equal importance and that traffic will be routed to the correct location regardless of its origination, or its destination.

Theory I say, because this isn't actually true. It is instead the ideal of Net Neutrality that people think of instead of the actual practice.

Currently, the practice is that individual packets of information all receive equal status. But if that was all there was to it, the Big Comms certainly wouldn't need Congress to pass a bill for them. Afterall, packets are routinely rerouted to alternate servers, alternate routes and even alternate destinations depending on criteria set by services and administrators. This is evidenced in the practice of rerouting to alternate servers for load balancing, to mirror sites in case a site is down, holding of email on your ISP's servers until a connection is successfully established and the email successfully delivered.

So why are the Big Comms doing this?

Profit.

They are trying to wring more money out of big businesses on the Net, like Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

The thing is they are already capable of providing different service levels to different customers. Just at Comcast and see the different levels they have there. There's Residential, Teleworker and Small Business accounts. Each has a diffent upload/download speed and each has a different cost.

Whats more, businesses like Google, Amazon and Microsoft already pay for larger bandwidth. They have to in order to maintain the speed and performance of their sites. Imagine if Google ran off a 768 kb DSL line. I'm sure that would work. Or Amazon. I mean, it is broadband. Its supposed to be fast, right? But a standard DSL service level would never work for these big companies.

So, since the big comms already have different service levels, and the ability to reroute and prioritize traffic, why do they need this bill?

Profit.

With this bill as law, they can leverage the law against big companies to wring more money out of them. Google will have to pay $xxxx to maintain their service levels. What's worst, once this precedence has been set, they will eventually turn their eyes towards the small ISPs who purchase bandwidth from them. Finally, they will turn their eyes towards you and me, the consumer.

Big Comm is using the global Internet as part of their reasoning. They declare that the US is falling behind other countries as far as Internet technologies go. And they are right. China, one of our biggest competitors, has a far more advanced network than we do. That's because China built their network from the ground up using IPv6. Many of the networks, and services in the US are stuck on IPv4. We are behind because we have a lot of entrenched legacy technology. Anyone whose worked for a big corporation knows what that is like.

The solution isn't allowing what essentially amounts to a speed lane for the Internet. Look how that's worked out for the Twin Cities. I hate it. I don't want to pay extra for my traffic. My connection is already slow enough. If they really want to they can set new service levels based soully on bandwidth, which they already do.

Whether you know it or not, Ma Belle is making a come back. And it is Big Comm.