Illustration by Martina Lo

When imagining someone “opposed to net neutrality”, you might think of a cartoon villain who also opposes rainbows, butterflies, and the power of friendship. For those who are only familiar with the newspaper headlines and late-night show punchlines, net neutrality equates to keeping the Internet open and accessible to everyone — who could possibly have a problem with that?

It turns out that real debate on net neutrality has less of a clear-cut, good-versus-evil nature to it than many realize. Yes, despised companies like Comcast play for the “anti-net neutrality” team. But controversial companies also lurk in the ranks of the supposedly righteous. #DeleteFacebook, anyone? Both sides raise valid concerns about the future of the internet, which could explain why this battle of the broadband has carried on for more than two decades.

What follows are sample arguments I have constructed for both sides of the net neutrality debate, based on the views and opinions I encountered from reading of primary sources, news, and articles. My hope is that sharing these arguments will help give an objective overview for those unfamiliar with net neutrality, as well as promote a little “neutrality” with discussions on this otherwise polarizing topic.

What is Net Neutrality?

Let’s start by highlighting a popular definition of net neutrality, which we will adopt for the purposes of this article:

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) — companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T — must treat all internet traffic equally.

In concrete terms: ISP’s cannot change the price, quality, access, or speed of your internet service based on who you are, who owns the websites you visit, or what kind of (legal) online activities you choose to engage in.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Framing The Debate

Both liberals and conservatives actually agree with the core idea of net neutrality. No one is promoting outright discrimination against or censorship of web content and services (at least not publicly). Craig Sillman, Verizon’s Executive Vice President, made sure to emphasize this message after the rollback of net neutrality regulations in December 2017:

“The FCC is not talking about killing the net neutrality rules. In fact, not we nor any other ISP are asking them to kill the open Internet rules. All they’re doing is looking to put the open Internet rules in an enforceable way on a different legal footing.”

Instead, constructive debate on net neutrality revolves around the specific details of regulation. Therefore, the two sides of the debate I aim to explore here are not “those for net neutrality” and “those against net neutrality”, but rather “those favoring strict regulation” and “those favoring loose regulation”.

An Argument for Strict Net Neutrality Regulation

The majority of Internet users have few options when it comes to choosing their service provider. This results from the industry’s high barrier to entry — it is insanely expensive and difficult to create a new ISP. Even the all-mighty Google failed to get its Fiber project off the ground.

Without sufficiently strict net neutrality regulations in place, a small group of incumbent ISP’s are free to exploit their monopolistic positions and engage in anti-competitive business practices.

One of the greatest fears is that ISP’s will force internet companies to pay more for fast connections to their sites — the idea of “fast lanes” or “paid prioritization” often mentioned in net neutrality news. If Comcast slowed down users’ connections to Medium unless the online publishing platform ponied up for better service, Medium would find itself in the uncomfortable position of deciding between paying an extortion fee or losing valuable business.

Image Credit: Pixabay

While big fish like Amazon and Google have deep enough pockets to shield themselves from “pay to play” pressures, promising startups and smaller companies who refuse to roll over (or could not afford to roll over even if they wanted) may quickly find themselves out of business. The end result: innovation suffers.

Consider that similarly underhanded practices could also occur in secret. At the moment, Comcast owns NBC Universal, which you could imagine gives them a fair bit of incentive to provide better quality streaming for NBC online videos while quietly slowing connections to rival content providers.

And why stop with simple tampering? If someone decided to write an article or blog post about how their experience with Verizon is terrible, or an executive at Verizon personally disagrees with a particular news organization’s opinion pieces, not much would prevent an unchecked Verizon from outright blocking these “objectionable” forms of content from its users.

Strict regulations are the only way to protect a truly free and open Internet.

An Argument for Loose Net Neutrality Regulation

As mentioned earlier, most everyone agrees that the internet should be open and accessible to all. But popular (often uninformed) interpretations of net neutrality tend to take the notion of “equal treatment” too far. The idea that we should completely shutdown an ISP’s ability to treat internet traffic differently demonstrates a severe lack of understanding of the issue. Adopting net neutrality regulations that are too strict could result in greater harm than good.

To the likely surprise of many, unequal treatment of internet traffic already exists as expected behavior for Internet Service Providers. Network providers engage in “reasonable network management” to meet the standards of something called “quality of service”. Different forms of data transmission have different needs. In order to provide a quality experience for a variety of applications — from real-time activities like voice/video calls to sending and receiving emails — distinctions and optimizations are made.

Forced equal treatment of all internet traffic could lead to “frozen videos, poor voice quality, inaccessible Web sites and call drops”.

Image Credit: Pixabay

To demonstrate another issue with overreaching regulations, imagine you and your friend decide to buy a car together. The two of you split the purchase cost evenly and share the car for day-to-day use. You put a hundred miles on it a month, simply driving to work and back. On the other hand, your friend racks up thousands of miles a month driving the car for Uber. When maintenance and repair costs roll around, would you want to split the costs evenly?

Two lone companies, Netflix and YouTube, make up ~50% of peak internet traffic in North America. In the process, they slow and stress the network for all other users — even users who do not subscribe to these entertainment services, and instead use the internet to read news, communicate with friends and family, search and apply for jobs, etc.

How unreasonable is it to treat Netflix and YouTube differently by asking them to pay their fair share? ISP’s need the ability to charge these companies relative to the massive amounts of bandwidth they consume, unless normal people like you and me want to generously help cover the hefty bill for these multi-billion-dollar companies.

“Hardcore” net neutrality advocates despise the concept of paid prioritization, arguing that it gives an unfair advantage to larger companies over innovative startup contenders. What they fail to account for is the fact that companies like Google and Amazon already pay for access to content distribution networks (CDN’s), which give their websites a noticeable speed boost. Paid prioritization offered by ISP’s could actually be a cheaper alternative to CDN’s that levels the playing field for startups.

Finally, the following image is not an example of a “non-neutral Portuguese ISP forcing users to pay more for access to specific websites”, as scores of activists and media outlets would lead you to believe:

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Quite the opposite, amusingly enough — this image showcases optional “add-ons” available for a normal, net neutrality-compliant, mobile data plan. Customers can access any website on their mobile device with their base plan (as expected), but can pay for packages that allow traffic to certain websites not to count against their data. Heavy users of Facebook, Netflix, or Spotify might love to take advantage of these special deals, unless strict net neutrality regulations identified these kinds of packages as “discrimination” and banned them. Whoops.