As if on cue, the Internet exploded yesterday with a vigorous debate involving millions of people around the globe, celebrating the arrival of Net Neutrality.
The debate was about the color of a dress. Thank goodness for Net Neutrality.
So before I get to Net Neutrality, let me get this out of the way. Anyone who’s ever ordered clothes online and been disappointed with the real life color knows this: pixels lie! Colors can be wildly off based on monitors, screen brightness, and most of all, digital “correction.” And if you’ve ever played with an image tool, you know that colors are, ahem, not black and white, but rather they, ahem, are points on a spectrum — green can become yellow, and so on. So I’m not quite sure why the Internet melted over the color of a dress yesterday, other than Net users really, really like to argue and sometimes have trouble recognizing that things aren’t always what they seem, and other people have other points of view.
So back to Net Neutrality. (I was on NBC Nightly News last night around the country sharing my views; you can watch the segment here. ) In the end, the FCC vote was anti-climactic, as Republicans revealed they wouldn’t block it a few days ago. Still, there was speech-giving about government ruining the Internet and killing innovation and all that. It’s breaks my heart that this most base rhetorical trick — if it’s the government, it must be bad! – still works on so many people. After all, Big Brother in this debate isn’t the government — it’s the 1 or 2 companies you have delivering bits and bytes to your home, thanks to the tragic lack of competition that exists among Internet Service Providers. I’m not saying the federal government deserves your trust, but why anyone would trust Comcast or Time Warner more than the government is beyond me.
It’s good Net Neutrality passed, because ISPs must treat all packets equally now, be they from my website or CNN. But I am not in the camp that thinks this is a huge victory for consumers. Don’t forget that this was largely a battle between large content companies and large Internet service providers, and the content companies won. ISPs will now have a harder time figuring out how to charge content companies more. One set of titans was picked over the other.
If you are interested in getting past the sloganeering of Net Neutrality, read this great story by Wired’s Robert McMillan. While so much of the Net Neutrality debate — and the dress debate, too — rested on folks taking bumper-sticker positions and not moving from them, the facts are not only more complex, but actually reassuring. Net Neutrality was always cast as a way to prevent fast lanes and slow lanes, so your visits to BobSullivan.net wouldn’t be ruined by CNN paying off ISPs. As McMillan explains, there already are fast lanes — so-called “peering” arrangements between large content firms and their ISPs, to make sure the video or other high-traffic application gets to users uninterrupted.
“We shouldn’t waste so much breath on the idea of keeping the network completely neutral. It isn’t neutral now. What we should really be doing is looking for ways we can increase competition among ISPs,” McMillan wrote.
Right. The real problem here is the monopoly or duopoly that most consumers live under. If we each had 10 or 20 ISPs to pick from, price would be lower, service would be better, and there’d be no fear that Comcast could ruin Netflix with the flick of a switch. Greater competition would do MUCH, MUCH more for American consumers than Net Neutrality. So now that the press conferences are over, and the FCC is finished congratulating itself, and we now know the dress is blue in real life…how about getting down to the real work of fixing America’s broken ISP market?
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