Threat to the Net

A deep, disconcerting vibration is thumping though the tech news and blogs. It seems that the political "geniuses" that is congress are determined to change the way traffic on the Internet is handled. I've been wanting to blog on this, but have had to take some time to figure out how to communicate this to my non-techy friends (Hi guys!!!).

OK...so...for quite some time it has been law among telecommunications companies that they have to treat each other's traffic like it is their own. In other words, if BellSouth is your telephone service provider and you call someone who uses ATT&T, then neither BellSouth nor ATT&T are allowed to do anything to degrade the phone call. So, the phone call quality for you and your buddy should be the same regardless of who each of you uses for telephone service.

I'm sure you can see that telephone would not like this law. They would rather have made calls between you and people who use the same service be a better quality than those phone calls between you and somebody who does not use the same service. That way they could effectively force people switch from their phone company to your phone company so that the calls would be of good quality. It doesn't take a rocket scienctist to see that this law is good for you, the consumer, but bad for the phone company.

With the invention of the Internet the telecommunication companies initially followed this principle. This is what allowed the Internet to grow so rapidly and allows for the free exchange of ideas across the Internet. This is known as "Net Neutrality." Lately though, telecommunication companies have been making a case that Internet traffic does not fall under the same law as telephone traffic and they believe that they can treat traffic coming from other networks differently than they treat traffic on their networks. Courts have agreed with them. The FCC has commented that it agrees with them. Congress is not deciding that it agrees with them.

This means that Internet Service Providers (ISPs), those people that you pay a monthly fee to get access to the Internet, can control what content you are allowed to access while on their network. They can give priority to their own traffic. They have threatened large website (Google, Amazon, eBay, etc...) that unless the large website pays a large fee to the ISP, then the ISP will degrade and/or even block their users from the big website. Can you imagine not being able to get to Amazon because they chose not to pay your ISP for the right for you to access them? It is ridiculous. Big companies will, of course, capitulate to the extortion and pay. Small businesses, though, will not be able to afford to pay an access fee to every ISP out there.

This is akin to the water company charging you one rate to wash clothes and another rate for taking a shower. Actually, it is like you paying a monthly water bill, but then the water company charging Maytag to allow you to send water to your washing machine. They are charging both you and the company to allow you to access the same content.

The idiots in congress, of course, are not tech heads. They only listen to the cash of the lobby for the ISPs and turn a deaf ear to us consumers. They don't understand the technical portions of an open, free, neutral Internet. The big companies have convinced them that there is a difference between Internet traffic and phone traffic.

Video Presentation\Explanation of this Problem

I'm not sure what we can do about it. I've written to my congressman and all I got back was a letter where he basically said it was a complex issue and he didn't really understand it, so he was going to trust the "experts" (read: paid lobbyist for the telecomm companies). I guess the fact that I work in the industry and am a Director of Information Services for a state agency doesn't make me an expert. Anyway, maybe with more of an outrage we can turn the tide. But nobody seems to care. Personally I think state CIOs should be talking to all 50 governors and explaining how this is going to affect state business. The governors could call the congressman and explain it more fully or set up a meeting between state CIOs and congressmen. The Federal CIO should be talking to the President and explaining the technical issues. Who is going to protect the consumer? Who is going to protect your business?

Another Article for you to read.