What if Net Neutrality Had Died in 1996?

( A version of this post was previously posted on Talent Zoo's Digital Pivot.)

Wonder what all the net neutrality fuss is about? Digital Pivot covered it, as did scores of other high-profile blogs, after Verizon and Google's recent submission of a joint-policy proposal in regard to an open Internet. What’s fired people up is that the proposal abdicates net neutrality on the wireless Internet and a set of to-be-determined preferred services outside the public Internet.

Nothing captures the worst-case scenario of what’s to come if net neutrality dies as much as a brilliantly designed picture posted on Reddit in 2009. That image, garnering over 1,865 comments, republished by the likes of CrunchGear, The Huffington Post, and others, shows a potential vision of future tiered pricing for the websites you visit

Quink's Reddit Picture If Net Neutrality Died Now

[LINK TO FULL IMAGE]

The logic the net neutrality defendants use is simple. If Net Neutrality dies on wireless (our future), the fear is the larger wireless networks (e.g. Verizon, AT&T)), those with high traffic counts, will be able to outbid smaller network providers for the high speed lane -- driving smaller providers out of the market. Smaller content providers, aka innovative new startups, will not be able to afford the high-speed lanes; therefore, end-users (you and me) will not be able to access smaller provider’s content. It will download dreadfully slowly, and video startups in particular, dependent on latency-intolerant streaming, will exhibit poor performance. 

As Senator Al Franken put it: “How long do you think it will take before the Fox News website loads five times faster than DailyKos?"

I loved Quink’s post and felt it truly made a potential no net neutrality outcome accessible to a wider range of people. However, it’s clear some still don’t get how outrageous this all is. Too often, Americans take for granted the services we have and have difficulty imagining what it would be like if the innovative services we have were missing. So I asked: What if net neutrality died in 1996? What Internet services and innovative software apps would we have today? That very steam punk (admittedly hyperbolic) vision of an alternate future is shown below. (Please forgive me, for exaggeration is often the best antidote for the exaggeration of others.)

Now, many will have to have look up those ancient Internet 1.0 services on Wikipedia. (Yeah, Telnet is a time-stretch. That was back when we walked barefoot in the snow to the Internet.) What this picture attempts to show is we would have had a tech monoculture, where basically the Internet services of 1996 are freeze-framed as today’s basic Internet services. No Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, or Google. No Youtube, with its glorious bandwidth-intensive user-generated content. Perhaps even no Freemium. (After all, with less competitive market pressure on incumbent large content providers by smaller entrepreneurial players, why worry if these poorly performing apps offer services for free?)

With only large content providers able to afford the high-speed lanes, our services largely would be confined to the innovations of incumbent players.

My message is this: If net neutrality dies, Quink’s diagram is a freeze-frame of not only our near-future range of services, but those for a longer term. We basically can write off the availability of many future innovative apps from startups. I’m not alone in this viewpoint: Others include prominent venture capitalists and the eminent Tim Berners-Lee (2006 video).

Even while earlier calling Google a “carrier-humping surrender monkey," Wired also wrote that the Google-Verizon proposal is “the best that we can expect," describing a legislative juggernaut that presages Net Neutrality’s doom:

 

In April, a federal appeals court ruled the Federal Communications Commission had no power to enforce its principles of net neutrality, absent congressional authority. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s decision was in response to the FCC dinging Comcast for throttling BitTorrent traffic, a move Comcast correctly said was outside the FCC’s purview.

To counter the appeals court, the FCC began a complex and politically thorny rule-making process to regain the authority it believed it had.

With such forces in place, it’s understandable why Franken has taken the extreme position in defending net neutrality, stating its death is a reneging of our First Amendment rights. If that’s too extreme for you, sit on the sidelines, and don’t sign his petition.

For me, too much is at risk to our already frail economy. To quote Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.: “The open Internet has been an innovation engine that has helped power our economy, and fiber-optic fast lanes or tiers that slow down certain content would dim the future of the Internet to the detriment of consumers, competition, job creation and the free-flow of ideas."  

Hell, maybe the Steampunk melodrama of visualizing "What if Net Neutrality had died in 1996?" is what it takes to get millions of BB gun shooters hitting against the 15-inch steel-plated legislative walls going up.