Are neutral networks needed to safeguard broadband freedoms?
By Adam Maya and Sonya Senkowsky
Jeremy Stern, at left, and Jonathan Taplin
|
Jonathan Taplin: No neutral network? Welcome to the ‘walled garden’
Never heard of network neutrality?” Look into it. “I think this is probably the most important entertainment story of the next five years,” said Jonathan Taplin.
The issue has to do with how broadband services are classified, and therefore how consumers may use them.
Last year, the FCC changed the classification of broadband from a telecommunications service to an informational service. The impact of this change, said Taplin, could be huge. Whereas providers can’t discriminate between signals traveling over a telecom (common carrier) service, they can over a network that is informational. This would include, he said, legally being able to slow down packets of content coming from a competitor or telling you what devices you can and can’t hook up to your service.
Keep in mind, he said, that Broadband IP network access from the home will soon not be just about computers, but about television.
Advocates for network neutrality, such as Taplin, are worried this change will transform broadband into a “walled garden” that only very few can afford to enjoy. Those outside its boundaries could legally receive poorer video, a stalled network and a blocking of purchases.
“They will tell you, ‘We would never do that.’ But why would you spend three years at the FCC getting all these rules through to do it?”
Few cases challenging network neutrality have yet been pursued. But in one instance that has, Vonage, a voiceover IP service, had its ports blocked by a phone company, so the service was unusable. This violation, said Taplin “was so egregious that the FCC actually did something about it. But it takes something that egregious.”
He does not expect competition to improve the situation.
“We have a telecom duopoly,” he said. “In any given town you might have a cable company and one DSL provider.” And that, he said, is how we can expect things to stay. “All the little guys will get eaten up.”
With broadband expanding rapidly, this duopoly is the only reason the price hasn’t come down.
Already, 66 percent of independent newspaper owners are gone; 40 percent of independent radio owners are gone; 43 percent of independent TV station owners are gone; and 73 percent of independent record label owners are gone. “There was a cornucopia of media and that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Every user, said Taplin, should enjoy these Four Freedoms of Broadband:
• freedom to access content without interference
• freedom to use applications
• freedom to attach personal devices
• freedom to obtain service plan information
Jeremy Stern: The opposite of neutrality is progress
On network neutrality
“The network neutrality debate isn’t about media concentration. It’s about innovation,” contended Jeremy Stern, who argued that wireless broadband falls outside the duopoly outlined by Taplin, and that a proprietary network has the right to control the way it provides service to its customers.
“If a cable company wants to provide a premium service that both a vendor is willing to pay them for and a consumer is willing to pay extra for, that’s a good thing. That innovation will be stifled by the network neutrality concept.”
Stern also cast doubt on the motivations of those who are for network neutrality. “The forces in support of network neutrality have commercial interests that want to limit innovation on the network, and spur innovation at the edge of the network—keep the pipe dumb and the edge smart.”
“Network neutrality will ultimately be anti-consumer and anti-innovation because it will discourage network providers from innovating.”
The ownership picture won’t be as bleak as Taplin suggested, he said, because too many services will be offering wireless broadband and consumers wouldn’t stand for their options being too limited. “If there’s anything that cable operators have learned, it’s that you can’t design your network in a way that people don’t want to use it. … Yes, there could be a pop-up when you go to amazon.com for Barnes & Noble. But it would be by consent. It’s not going to be forced on them because they’re going to go to another network.”
“Fear is what’s driving this debate,” Stern concluded. “There is no evidence but anecdotal stories about the potential of cable operators to degrade service, to slow down data transfers.”
|
