By Niall Kitson
Before proceeding into the meat and potatoes of this piece ask yourself this question: what is the Internet?
Is it a collection of hardware, servers, cabling and physical infrastructure? How about a stream of information constantly in flow around the world? Is it a forum for learning and the new global conversation, or is it a haven for libellous comments just waiting for a litigious character to mess things up for everyone?
Think of an answer and hold it for a moment. Now try this one: Who owns the Internet?
Your answer to that question may help you clarify your position. If you think it’s about hardware then ownership is split globally and locally across dozens of different technologies and hundreds of providers with their own terms and conditions.
If you think it’s a flow of data then its nature is ephemeral, beyond value and uncontrollable; it crosses borders with ease and is virtually immune to the concept of ownership, let alone its practicalities.
If you think it’s a forum then it belongs to everyone equally – a great democratic assembly open to all where every voice has a right to be heard.
Finally, let’s boil things down to a single question: Is it free?
This works in two directions. If you pay for a service provided via a telecommunications network then, monetarily at least, the Internet is most certainly not free. If you think it is a place of ideas then the Internet is free, or at least it should be.
Such is the struggle between commercial entities and activists in the area of ‘Net neutrality’. Based on the principle that the Web – and access to it – should be free from influence of political or commercial concerns, the Net neutrality movement represents a campaign for an open-minds, open-borders approach to the Internet.
At first glance this should be a non-issue. As global network infrastructure improves and proliferates, access to the Internet should become ubiquitous, and even a measure of healthy competition might creep in to keep pricing honest. Similarly, turning the Web into a walled garden is time consuming and could be based on reasons that can seem arbitrary and flimsy, not to mention impinge on human rights, creating an expensive legal nightmare.
As of now the situation exists where commercial concerns have barely touched the thorny issue of censorship and content monitoring – be it through commercial or political motives – in the west. In the far east, however, a different situation exists whereby search giant Google has had to limit the kind of results enquiries return based on political sensitivity in order to gain access to its market of one billion people – a faustian pact too far for the neutrality lobby.
In an attempt to cement their commitment to Net neutrality Google and US telecommunications provider Verizon addressed the issue by releasing a legislative framework proposal. The seven-point plan effectively outlined a vision for how an open and transparent Internet could be managed in terms of access and content.
For the most part the document – all two pages of it – rests on common sense. Although focusing on the US, Google-Verizon argues for broadband access for all with a role for government regulation of how networks are managed and the content users can access across them.
A two-tier Web?
It’s all very nice and neat until you pick out the issue of wireless connectivity – singled out for its own entry for a specific reason.
With the continued roll-out of wired fibre networks it could be argued that a connectivity divide is forming where land-based connections are providing speeds up to 100Mb/s (and possibly more), where wireless connections are in danger of being left for dust as applications become ever more bandwidth-hungry.
As a matter of practicality, in order for wireless technologies to remain viable there must be some compromise owing to their “still-developing nature”.
Whatever about the nature of Web applications like streaming music and video services such as Grooveshark, RTÉ Player and YouTube, the implication that networks may have to control their access has Net neutrality activists up in arms, arguing that limiting access – regardless of network capacity – is contrary to the very principles Google and Verizon were proposing to uphold in the first place.
By putting down their principles on paper, it could be said, both search engine and service provider had laid down the rules for a potential two-tier Web, and what better way to beat a restriction on access to your website than to start paying for the privilege?
Fed up with slow loading clips? Well maybe another website has beaten the problem by paying their way up the food chain. Google and Verizon have denied they have any such plans, but it does make for excellent conspiracy theory fodder.
So what might all this mean for our small market? Well for urban areas it may not mean much at all. Competing technologies like fibre, copper, 3G wireless and WiMax make any sort of content/network arrangement uneconomical and likely only to cause an almighty amount of market tension.
For rural areas with less choice, or those covered only by the National Broadband Strategy where 3 may be the sole service provider, the situation could become murkier.
The classic example, that of ‘port blocking’ to prevent peer-to-peer file sharing (usually of copyrighted material), has always been part of Clearwire’s service. The intention, Clearwire would argue, is to offer an equitable distribution of resources without the hog of illegal file sharing that still amounts to almost half the traffic on the Web.
Who owns the Internet? Somewhere between idealism and commercial clout lies an answer. It’s the not knowing that keeps everything precarious...and free.
Niall Kitson is editor of PC Live! and co-host of TechLife
For more on technology, listen to the podcast at www.pcliveradio.ie
