If You Understand Bridgegate, You Get Net Neutrality

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If the Internet is a six-lane highway, we might be in danger of people setting up some New Jersey-style traffic cones.

Image: Mashable composite. iStockphoto, sourabhj

By Lance Ulanoff2014-01-16 00:23:00 UTC

Ever since the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stuck down the Federal Communication Commission’s Net Neutrality rules, I can’t stop thinking about how much this reminds me of Governor Chris Christie's New Jersey Bridge Scandal.

That mess is proof about how one relatively small body’s actions can make a world of difference on the steady flow of people through one of the nation’s busiest thoroughfares. The Internet has often been referred to as a many-laned highway (or super highway). There are no cars, just billions and billions of bits. They cruise along this digital highway largely unfettered, just as, when things are going very smoothly, thousands of cars can make it to and through the Washington Bridge tolls without much trouble or incident.

See also: D.C. Appeals Court Strikes Down Net Neutrality Rules

However, once a few political aides decided to narrow that lane, things changed rapidly. The experience of driving to work became, based on reports I’ve read, a living hell. It went on for days. Worse yet, there was no good reason for the hold up. This was simply a case of some apparently vindictive people in government exacting revenge.

There are rules against people doing such things and now the Governor and his fired aids, among others, are facing scrutiny and, in some cases, legal trouble.

You may soon be facing similar trouble on your broadband connection.

A Question of Traffic Control

The Internet works a lot like that multi-lane highway. When you browse the web or stream music or video, the pipes (your speed does depend on how much you pay) are wide open to let the information arrive from whatever server it started on to your home computer, tablet, smartphone or set-top box. Since the dawn of the Internet, ISPs have built more and more lanes to deliver ever-larger amounts of enriched content. Today, we sit in our homes and download countless gigabytes of HD video from a variety of services (mostly Netflix and Apple’s iTunes). We also engage in social media and browse a dizzying array of websites.

Now imagine that one of those ISPs shuts down a portion of a lane into your home, but does it strategically. It lets some content through, while placing cones in the lanes of others. For the last few years, right up until Jan. 14, this was against the rules, at least the Net Neutrality rules set forth by the FCC in 2010.

I know that for most consumers, Net Neutrality remains an esoteric concept, but the stakes are high and if we don’t have any rules in place, the frustration could be as real as being stuck in a four-day traffic jam.

Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu has been writing about Net Neutrality for well over a decade. In fact, in 2002, he drafted his own “Proposal for Net Neutrality.” In it he sought to:

“Strike a balance: it would forbid broadband operators, absent a showing of harm, from restricting what users do with their internet connection, while giving the operator general freedom to manage bandwidth consumption and other matters of local concern.”

The 11-page document is fairly dense and, at the time, focused heavily on how to manage VPN and gaming traffic. In the early days of home broadband, these were the lead consumers of home broadband bandwidth.

Wu also took pains to acknowledge the service provider’s basic need to protect the network:

“What makes the problem difficult is that that are also usage restrictions that are undeniably reasonable. Operators must also have the freedom to manage bandwidth, and prohibit uses of the network that damage the integrity of the network or seriously impinge the rights of other users. Such restrictions are necessary if broadband carriage is to be a viable business.”

The Core of the Net Neutrality Problem

I contacted Wu in the aftermath of the court ruling to see if he had any new perspective. He pointed me to a new post on The New Yorker . His perspective now appears more firmly in the consumer camp and Professor Wu recognizes that the lack of FCC Net Neutrality oversight could lead to new kinds of harm:

“Without net-neutrality rules, a firm like Verizon or Comcast can do whatever it likes to content moving across its network. If it wants, it can make a blog that criticized its latest policies unreachable, or block T-Mobile’s customer support. Acting together, the Internet service providers could destroy Netflix by slowing its data to a crawl, making movies impossible to watch.”

What Wu describes is the Nuclear Option, one that even he suspects no rational-minded ISP would pursue.

Even so, this is why you should care that — at least for the moment — there is no Net Neutrality Rule in place in America.

You Can’t Stop, and You Won’t Stop

Roughly 71% of all America households currently have broadband access. We also know that Netflix now accounts for 32% of all broadband traffic.

According to The NPD Group, the other streaming services, Hulu and Amazon Prime, are far behind (Netflix now has, according to The NPD Group, a 92% share). Apple’s iTunes dominates the movie rental and purchase space with 67% in 2012. The number was likely larger in 2013.

The NPD also reports that, in Q2 of 2013, 17% of the Internet population (13 and older) downloaded music from services like iTunes and Amazon. All this means is that we are all binge-watching a lot of House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, renting movies like crazy from Apple and, I suspect, streaming a never-ending soundtrack from a variety of music services.

And this is only the beginning.

Amazon, Netflix and Hulu will deliver even more original content this year, some of it as bandwidth-busting 4K video.

Now step back and think about this. All that new, ultra-high resolution video is on its way to your broadband-connected homes. The difference between standard HD and 4K Ultra HD will be akin to the difference between four lanes of traffic and 16. But now, we don’t have a traffic cop in place to police any of it, to make sure that everyone plays nice and that no one drops a cone in front of two or four lanes of traffic because those cars are not carrying favored passengers.

We will want that Net Neutrality oversight because without it, there is no guarantee that Verizon FiOS won’t punish content from, say, Nicks basketball-owning Cablevision (oh, sorry, did you want to watch that game?) or that Hulu-stake-owning Comcast won’t give priority to the new Hulu shows and leave the new season of Netflix’s House of Cards trying to squeeze over from its coned off lanes to one that’s actually moving.

Net Neutrality may have been the only thing ensuring that petty disagreements, business interests and pure spite do not get in the way of unfettered enjoyment of 16-lane-wide digital content.

Topics: comcast, hulu, Mobile, net neutrality, netflix, U.S., US & World, verizon, verizon fios tv