“Net Neutrality” Gets Dissed
I usually like John Dvorak’s articles on PC Magazine. He’s been around the industry for years and is generally very level-headed. But recently he let loose a very odd commentary in which he said the idea of Net Neutrality (i.e. the concept that ISPs should not be able to “bias” access to one portion of the net or another, based on preferencing and other tricks) is “crap.” I can’t disagree more with this one, though I sort of understand where he’s coming from.
On several occasions in the past, various ISPs have either planned or tried to implement schemes in which they attempted to control, or at least manipulate, how users accessed various online resources. As John says, Net Neutrality “became a concern when a CEO of an ISP began to make noise about Google screwing his company over somehow, and how his company might have to charge Google to even come on the network. The fact is, this guy, who will remain nameless, was an idiot. OK?” But those scenarios are very plausible, and I think they’re predictable, unless Federal rules are established to prohibit them.
Think of it this way: let’s say you’re a Comcast customer, and you try to visit Google’s site…but maybe Comcast doesn’t have an agreement with Google, so your request gets routed to a different search engine altogether. Or you try to visit Amazon.com, only to find your requests being handled very slowly because Amazon hasn’t paid your ISP for “preferred” access to their network. Given the way telecommunications companies are trying to squeeze pennies out of consumers, I think it’s only a matter of time before someone tries this.
John seems to think it won’t happen, or that consumers will vote with their feet by moving to other ISPs who have “fair” access algorithms (this despite the fact that, in many areas today, consumers have no choice but to use one local provider).
He also throws out some serious straw man arguments by asking whether Net Neutrality is “really more important than the pressing issues of poor rural Internet access, DNS attacks, spam, bots, snooping, and virus writers?” I’m sorry, but those topics have nothing to do with fair network access or limiting ISPs from making “most favored nation” style treaties with various online retailers or other sites.
Net Neutrality may be a somewhat ill-defined concept at present, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant or a “crap” issue. And John should know better.