Neutrality

The U.S. Court of Appeal ruled today that FCC (Federal Communications Commission) does not have authority to require broadband provider to give equal access to all internet traffics. I know some of you may look at this ruling from big government's angle, which I will not get into. But one must realize the potential affect on the future of the internet in the United States. Neutrality is important because it could diminish internet innovation and lose the edge we have in the world.

When broadband providers control the traffic flows, they can pick and chose what applications will get the best bandwidth. Such controls can either make application owners to pay for better bandwidth or share some part of revenues. This is in addition for broadband users paying their own services so broadband providers will receive payments from two sources, application users and owners. The amount of revenues from these double source can be huge and consumer will always pay it at the end because application owners will pass the costs to the consumers to maintain their share of the revenues.

Another important issue regarding to neutrality is that the broadband providers have total control, like traffic cops. They have the power to decide what consumers can get and which applications the consumer should get. How so, you might ask? Since they control the speed of the traffics, they can affect user experiences by reducing/increasing bandwidth according to their preferences. They can increase bandwidth for their favored applications while reduce bandwidth they don't like. As we all know, once we, as consumers, had bad experience, we tend to abandon that application. If you think about it, the broadband providers have enormous power to sharp up the future of the internet instead of letting market, consumers, to decide.

Here is another one. Some of the most popular applications today, Yutube, Flickr, and Hulu for example, started from very small. They reached today's popularity because of the neutrality. If they had to pay for bandwidth, who knows if they can get the popularity they enjoy now. When broadband providers control internet traffics, new applications will have a harder time to reach to the targeted audiences and will slow innovations. Entrepreneurs will be hard to find in this country while other countries will gradually catchup with us and eventually pass us. In addition, without neutrality, our free market based economy will no longer be true.

One argument I heard was that broadband providers spent billions of dollars to build up their networks so they should be able to control the traffics on their networks. The problem I have with this argument is that consumers pay for the services and they should have the freedom to go anywhere I want. If Comcast doesn't provide a competitive video on demand services, then consumers should have the choice to watch videos on hulu instead of being forced to watch videos on Comcast.