Tech Notes with Herb Kim

Aug 9 2007 by Herb Kim for The Journal

A FIERCE argument about the distinctly unsexy issue of “net neutrality” is rumbling on in the US right now – and it could spell the end of the internet as we know it.

In simple terms, net neutrality is the guiding principle that preserves the free and open internet.

With this principle in place, the only job of the internet network is to move data – not to choose certain data to privilege with higher quality service.

However, there are no regulations in place to enforce net neutrality. And, in the US, the nation’s largest telephone and cable companies want to abandon it and become the “gatekeepers” of the internet over there, with the power to decide which websites run fast, slow, and which won’t load at all.

These companies want to charge content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. According to Save The Internet, a coalition working to regulate the internet, they also want to discriminate in favour of their own search engines and services while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

There are strong voices on both sides of the argument.

Proponents of neutrality – large internet and tech concerns such as Google and Microsoft, along with consumer rights groups – are lobbying for government regulations that would enforce the principle.

They believe the internet serves as a “level playing field”, in that end-users and content providers are charged a flat fee for access to the entire high-speed infrastructure – and that this enables the best ideas and technologies on the web to rise to the top.

For example, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched Google they soon became top dogs because their technology worked differently, and far better, than their competitors.

Without net neutrality, it’s likely that Google would’ve struggled to get off the ground.

If it didn’t exist, Microsoft or Yahoo could have used their financial muscle to make their search engines run faster, striking deals with internet portals to block out or slow down competitors.

Of course, today Google is huge, and abandoning net neutrality now won’t change that. But it’s easy to see how it could hinder such innovations becoming successful in the future.

On the other side of the fence, the cable and telecom industries argue net neutrality regulations would limit the usefulness of the internet, and such regulations threaten to set a dangerous precedent for more intrusive regulation.

While I agree we must be careful about regulating the internet, I hardly think setting regulations that would enable the brightest ideas and innovations to succeed constitutes a “dangerous” precedent.

Net neutrality underpins the market of ideas on the internet. Current signs suggest the US government will not enforce it – a decision which could leave the web a much poorer place for all of us, not just Americans.

Herb Kim is chief executive of Codeworks, the North-East’s centre of digital excellence.