The Loft » Blog Archive » What Net Neutrality Really Means
Let’s say you want to send a birthday card to your nephew Ronnie. You put a 39-cent stamp on the envelope and drop it off at the post office. And away it goes (you hope). Now let’s say that instead of sending little Ronnie a birthday card, you want to send him a shiny, new bicycle. If you support so-called “net neutrality,” that means you think the government should require that the post office deliver Ronnie his shiny, new bike for the same price it charges to mail him the birthday card. The post office would have to be “neutral” in what it charges to mail any given item.
No, that’s not what it means. What the telecom companies are proposing is this: You want to send a Huffy bike to little Johnny for his birthday, which is a week away. FedEx says “Okay, we’ll send that, but it will cost you $35. Oh, and because we don’t have a contract with Huffy, it will take at least two weeks.” But if you tried to send a Schwinn bike of the same weight and size, they’d say “Okay, we’ll send that, but it will cost you $30 and it will get there in three days.” Now, if you chose UPS, they’ll send the Huffy faster and cheaper, but not the Schwinn.
Sounds great, right? Sure, if you’re Giant or Huffy or UPS or FedEx. You can have strategic partnerships that improve your business. But what if you’re a startup company? You can’t afford the big contracts with FedEx OR UPS. So you’re automatically putting startups at a disadvantage and supporting the status quo.
That’s the predicament my company is in. We’re a small company, and our clients aren’t huge. But if Verizon or AT&T or Comcast start charging for faster access, they’ll be at a disadvantage, so we’ll be at a disadvantage.
What net neutrality proponents are suggesting is this: Treat all traffic the same, but meter based on the amount of traffic. If you send a card, you pay a little. If you send a bike, you pay a lot. Not because one’s made by Hallmark and the other is made by Huffy, but because one’s heavier than the other. Sites that host a lot of video pay a lot for their bandwidth because they use more of it, not because they’re sending video, and not because of who they are. That’s the way things work right now.
If the telecommunications companies need more money to fund a broadband rollout, then they need to charge more for bandwidth, not judge who is and isn’t worthy of being given preferential treatment.
And what that conservative blog is neglecting to say is that those countries have huge broadband penetration because their governments took a stand and forced the telecommunications companies to provide access cheaply and efficiently, and without needing to decide which traffic to give preference to.