empty rhetoric

Ars Technica has an article up today that explains new deep packet inspection technologies and its relevance to the future of the internet– and indeed, ideas on the internet:

The article is fairly lengthy, but instructive, and points, I think, to several very important issues that are going to become hot-button debates in the coming years. Beyond simple network neutrality, it raises concerns about freedom of expression, privacy, and potential issues regarding what the internet is going to look like in the future.

Dire predictions have been made about the future of the internet– the increased demand for video in particular seems to be of the most concern– but such predictions of a future wherein the internet comes to a halt because major backbone providers are unable to discriminate between, say, a teenager in California pirating the latest Hollywood blockbuster and an MRI scan being sent to New York for analysis are both wrongheaded and, I think, dangerous– precisely because they fail to view the internet as it is, but rather, what net neutrality critics wish it to be.

It is said that a large majority of internet traffic travels over Bittorrent, the peer-to-peer filesharing technology that allows end users to maximize bandwidth on their end of the spectrum and overcome problems that occur when millions of people attempt to flood a single source of data. Those in favor of allowing deep packet inspection to throttle that sort of traffic assert that no matter how much more bandwidth is added to the system, it will never be able to keep up with this torrent of data.

But the question that is never asked by net neutrality opponents is why bittorrent (and other high-bandwidth protocols) are so enormously popular– and the answer is simply “supply and demand”: there is a huge demand for quick and easy transmission of large files over the internet. That fact is not going to go away– and attempting to solve it by limiting use fails to address the fact that, in the future, there will be more, not less demand for increased bandwidth. Looking for new and better ways to throttle it stifles the clear message consumers are sending: more bandwidth. What’s more, consumers have clearly voted for more nondiscriminatory bandwidth– and they have done so simply by participating in the explosive growth of the internet.

The fact of the matter is, the internet is an open, non-discriminatory platform. That it is essentially neutral is one of its defining characteristics. Moving toward an internet that is not inherently neutral means changing the essential nature of it– in essence, redefining it. Without net neutrality, we would be destroying the internet as we know it, and replacing it with something entirely new.

But what is more important to realize is that we would be replacing it with something that lacked some of the most important features of the internet as it exists today– we would be removing from the system the very characteristics that allowed it to become the dominant medium of communication, and squander opportunities that would allow us to further its boon to both the national and international economy.

It is, I think, a misconception to assert that net neutrality would limit the free market– indeed, it preserves it by ensuring a level playing field. Much like the antitrust laws that prevent unfair competition, net neutrality would ensure that major backbone providers and ISP’s would have to allow the consumer to decide what sort of data they send and receive on the internet. The increased attempts to throttle certain kinds of traffic has shown that major ISP’s have already voted against the consumer– net neutrality advocates are in favor of disallowing such an obviously anti-capitalist, anti-free-market, anti-consumer behavior.

In short, the internet is not a truck. Its a series of nondiscriminatory tubes– addressing the exaflood means making them bigger, not limiting their expansion by limiting the consumer.

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Tags: net-neutrality, tech, internet, politics, ted-stevens