There’s been a lot of interest lately in the technology community about an issue known as net neutrality. Technically, the idea behind net neutrality is simple: a network provider (e.g. AT&T, a telephone network provider) must provide access to the internet without discriminating.

Discriminating based on what? One possibility is by consumer: the network provider must charge the same amount for internet access regardless of who uses it. Another related possibility is by packet: the network provider must charge the same amounts for any kind of traffic, so you pay the same price whether you use it for videoconferencing or online gaming.

Should we care?

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.

-Ecclesiastes 1:9-14

As much as this appears to be a new issue, involving lots of technical information about packets and protocols, the basic underlying problem is economic, and it has to do with monopoly.

Monopoly, however, is not automatically evil simply because it means that one company controls the market. To understand (a) why the actions of network providers might be bad for the public and (b) how and why network neutrality might be considered a remedy, we’ll look at two points:

1. The Power of Choice

The reason monopoly is bad is not necessarily that Microsoft will overcharge for Windows, or that Verizon will overcharge for phone service (as much as they might do that in a monopoly position). No, the problem is not price; MS not charging too much can, in fact, make one complacent about the real problem.

Rather, the problem is choice. As long as you have a number of alternatives, you never have to put up with one company’s poor or irresponsible decisions.

A boycott is a poor alternative to real choice; first of all, the company’s products may be unavoidable, and secondly, it’s much harder to get customers to stop benefiting from a product entirely than to get them to switch to a similar competitor.

2. Product Tying

One decision that is irresponsible for the public at large is leveraging a monopoly to sell something else. If internet browser X and internet browser Y are competing, X will automatically have an advantage if it comes with every computer (and Y doesn’t).

Or, more insidiously, if one company makes all computers, they can simply break Y and make it not work on their computers. Even if X wasn’t the better product, it would be more successful. This is the doomsday flag that net neutrality proponents wave–Verizon, for example, could slow down or block Skype, and thus force people to use its own internet phone service. This is one of the worse possible evils, but there are many others.

3. Net Neutrality

If monopoly in internet access is the problem, why not fix that instead? Why net neutrality?

The premise of net neutrality is partially that getting rid of the internet access monopoly is impossible. (i.e. we can’t fix problem 1). So instead of dealing with the root cause which can’t be corrected, we correct the most serious symptom (problem 2)–the product tying. Verizon can’t make you switch to search engine Verizonsearch; they have to grant equal access to both.

Conclusions
The big questions to face in this debate are these:

• Do we have to fix the symptom and not the disease?
• Is there a reason that current antimonopoly legislation won’t solve the problem?
• How can we make sure that net neutrality is set up to solve the problem?

These are all real questions, but with understanding solutions can be found.

Links
Should the Net Be Neutral?
Wireless Carriers’ Veto Over How Phones Work Hampers Innovation
Net Neutrality: Wikipedia
Hardware Firms Go Against Crowd on Net Neutrality (discussion post)