When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, he didn’t need to ask Comcast, Verizon, or other internet service providers to add Facebook to their networks. He also didn’t have to pay these companies extra fees to ensure that Facebook would work as well as the websites of established companies. As soon as he created the Facebook website, it was automatically available from any internet-connected computer in the world.

This aspect of the internet is network neutrality. And a lot of network neutrality supporters fear it's in danger. President Obama pledged to support net neutrality on the campaign trail in 2007, and this week he unveiled a detailed net neutrality proposal. But authority over internet regulation doesn't rest with Obama, it rests with the Federal Communications Commission, an independent agency chaired by former cable industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler. And according to a Tuesday story in the Washington Post, Wheeler has signaled that he won't be adopting Obama's proposal. Instead, he's looking for a way to "split the baby," finding a way to protect internet openness without declaring broadband to be a public utility. That might look something like his May proposal, which would let broadband companies treat content differently provided it did so in a "commercially reasonable" fashion. This is about ensuring that the internet remains a fertile ground for new innovations Yet the prospect of weak network neutrality regulations isn't even the biggest threat to a level playing field online. The internet itself is changing in ways that threatens to make the conventional net neutrality debate almost irrelevant. Earlier this year, Netflix agreed to pay first Comcast and then Verizon for private connections directly to their respective networks. Netflix signed these deals under protest, charging that it had been coerced to pay "tolls" just to deliver content to their own customers. That might sound like a net neutrality violation, but the practice doesn't actually run afoul of the network neutrality rules advocates have been pushing for the last decade. Those rules ban "fast lanes" for content that arrives over the internet backbone, the shared information super highway that carries the bulk of the internet traffic today. But what Netflix paid Comcast and Verizon for amounts to a new, private highway just for Netflix traffic. Conventional network neutrality rules don't regulate this kind of deal. These private connections are going to be increasingly important to the American internet in the coming years. That might force net neutrality proponents to go back to the drawing board. Otherwise they might win the battle for net neutrality and still lose the war for a level playing field on the internet. The problem with fast lanes It's a typical weekday evening and you and your neighbors are all using the internet in various ways. You're watching Netflix videos, playing World of Warcraft, checking email, downloading podcasts, and reading cardstacks on Vox.com. The information required to display all this content is sent from servers all over the world. But it quickly finds its way to your internet service provider, the company that provides you and your neighbors with home internet access. Internet usage is particularly heavy this evening, and your ISP doesn't have the capacity to handle all the data you and your neighbors are downloading. So your neighbor's World of Warcraft game starts to stutter. Another's House of Cards episode freezes up and starts buffering. Your Skype video chat to your sister becomes pixelated and jerky. A digital traffic jam is ruining everyone's internet experience.





Some people think a "fast lane" arrangement is the solution to this problem. Some applications are more affected by congestion than others. Some applications are more valuable to users than others. So maybe the network ought to give top priority to applications that need it the most. And why shouldn't your ISP use the same method as FedEx to decide who gets the fastest delivery? Applications that need faster delivery can pay extra for it. The network might look like this:





Here, MyFlix has paid AT&Tcast to give its content priority over the content of its competitors. MyFlix customers get an excellent experience, but using YouBook or FaceTube might not be as pleasant. But this isn't how the internet works right now. For the most part, internet connections work on a first-come, first-served basis, with no one's packets getting special treatment. And net neutrality supporters think that's a good thing. There are several arguments for this neutral internet model. One is simplicity. There are thousands of networks around the world. The miracle of the internet is that anyone can set up a web server, anywhere in the world, and instantly reach everyone else, no matter where they are or what network they're using. But if broadband providers started dividing their networks up into fast lanes and slow lanes, things could get more complicated. To get satisfactory service for your website, you might have to negotiate fast-lane agreements with thousands of ISPs all over the world. Companies that didn't have the money — or the manpower — to do that would be at a competitive disadvantage. Smaller companies with less cash and fewer lawyers are going to be at a competitive disadvantage There's also a danger that large internet service providers will abuse their monopoly power. Most of the leading American broadband companies also sell paid television services that compete directly with online streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Instant Video. Network owners might be tempted to relegate online video services to the slow lane to prevent them from becoming a competitive threat to their lucrative paid television businesses. Or they might charge competing services a big markup for access to the fast lane, ensuring that they won't be able to undercut them on price. A final problem is that a multi-tiered business model could give ISPs perverse incentives. An ISP might be tempted to make its slow lane slower — or at least not upgrade it very quickly — to encourage content companies to pony up for fast-lane status. At root, all of these arguments are about ensuring that the internet remains a fertile ground for new innovations. When Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim invented YouTube in 2005, they didn't have to negotiate special fast-lane contracts with ISPs around the world. They also didn't have to worry that incumbent broadband providers would view them as a threat to their cable services and relegate them to the slow lane — or demand fast-lane fees so high they couldn't afford to pay them. YouTube could compete with much larger companies on a level playing field. Network neutrality advocates want to make sure it stays that way. The changing internet When an ISP receives the bulk of its traffic through one big transit provider, as in the figure above, network neutrality is relatively easy to define. It just means that the ISP needs to handle the packets it receives over that big pipe on a first-come, first-served basis. That's how things worked when Tim Wu, an academic who's now a law professor at Columbia, coined the term network neutrality in 2002. ISPs purchased connectivity from a handful of companies that operated long-distance networks known as the internet's backbone. Companies that provided this service, known in industry lingo as "transit," acted as middle-men, carrying data between ISPs and content providers. But the internet's structure is changing. Both residential ISPs and content companies have been growing larger and more sophisticated. And increasingly, they are cutting out the middle-men. Instead of relying on transit providers to carry traffic between them, they're connecting to each other directly. As a result, the internet increasingly looks like this:



