The Official Guide to Zachtopia A comprehensive guide to Zach's random thoughts

Net Neutrality (finally) Back on the Front Burner

Alright… Don't try to tell me you don't care about Net Neutrality.  Unless a friend printed this off for you, you’re reading this online and I’m guessing you don’t enjoy when a simple page like this takes a long time to load.  Well, if some companies could have their way (*cough* Comcast *cough*), you’d be at their mercy when it comes to how fast your Internet is.

Hold on, let’s back up a little.  What exactly did Comcast do and why are nerds like me dropping our keyboards for swords to fight the good fight against the evil corporations?

Last year the FCC determined that Comcast had been “throttling” Internet traffic for their customers.  Basically they were filtering Internet data and if they found something that looked like it came from a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing application, they slowed it down (or maybe stopped it entirely?) because it seemed suspicious.  In case you don’t know, P2P applications have a famous (and mostly accurate) reputation for giving people a means to quickly download illegal copies of movies and music.  The Comcast situation would be similar to police stopping all white Ford Broncos in the country and questioning them during the famous O.J. police chase in California.

Honestly, I have absolutely no problem with what Comcast did on a practical level.  If you live in an apartment with a shared Internet connection and somebody is constantly downloading huge files (movies?), then that will slow down your connection significantly – it’s like constantly flushing a toilet while you’re trying to take a shower.   I hope you kind of get the idea of what was going on.  Comcast said “Alright file-sharers.  We can’t scare you into stopping, so we’ll slow you down to the point where it’s not worth your time to download movies anymore”.  The problem is that Comcast violated a very, very important aspect of the Internet: all traffic is to be treated equally. (Thou shalt not anger the noble nerds of the Internet)

If you browse to Google’s home page and then to Yahoo’s home page, the load times should be about the same (granted server location and all that garbage plays a role in the actual speed – let’s forget about that for now).  That’s Net Neutrality.  Google can’t go to Verizon or Comcast and say “Hey guys, we’ll pay you a ton of money if our pages can load faster than Microsoft’s pages – deal?”.  Maybe something like that would start a huge bidding war between Google and Yahoo to see who can pay the most for the fastest pages – but that would completely destroy any chance for a new competitor to offer a similar service on the Web.  Let’s say you’re some college kid and you’ve created a way to search the Internet that’s 10 times faster than Google or Yahoo.  With Google and Microsoft throwing their chunks of money around there’s no way you can enter that battle.

Have no fear, the FCC is here!

The FCC has set up a Website that explains the new chairman’s (Julius Genachowski) thoughts about Net Neutrality and Internet availability in general.  It’s a lot to read and you may not agree with all of it (or any of it), but it’s simply a must-read if you care at all about the future of the Internet.

http://www.openinternet.gov/read-speech.html