As an IT guy, I thought I would give a little info today on Net Neutrality, and what it is. Ive seen a couple of posts, and I figured I would try to provide a little clarity on what it is exactly. Most people really do not understand how the Internet works. It actually functions a bit like a water utilities system. You have the pipes on your property, the city water pipes, and the pipes at water distribution sites. Each could be owned by a separate entity, but usually arent. On your property, you buy pipes depending on what your needs are. However, the city has to have pipes in place, and insure that they are big enough to support all the homes in the city. The water company has to have big enough pipes to supply the constant pull of water needed. If everyone in the city turned all their faucets on at the same time, water pressure would quickly drop to almost nothing, because the infrastructure wasnt designed for that. Because, not everyone uses water at the same time. Instead, its based on peak times and ratios. Meaning a certain average number of people are using water, and at certain times of the day, those averages go up. However, if consumption grows, the city may have to install bigger pipes, and the water distribution center may have to increase their output as well. Generally these costs get passed on to customers on their water bills. The difference with the Internet is that it is not regulated as a utility (although some think it should be). It is instead all commercially owned, and there are a lot of companies involved. In the analogy, the thousands of ISPs are the pipes in your home, a couple dozen telecom companies own the city pipes, and the water distribution is literally millions of Internet sites. Also, you dont pay by the gallon (or MB in data terms). This is where the problem began. You pay for connection speeds. It would be like the water company charging you each month for a gallon per minute rate instead of how much you actually use, then counting on the fact that you wont use it all the time. However, everything started fine. Because not everyone uses the Internet at the same time, ratios allowed the pipes to gradually be increased without effecting the cost structure too much. But, the game changer was Netflix. Because of the popularity of it, it was suddenly like a third of the homes in the city suddenly turned on all their faucets. Now we need bigger pipes, and who pays for it? Netflix pays for a big enough connection to support their customers, the problem is that they are actually using all of it. And their customers are actually using the bandwidth their ISPs are selling them. This is throwing the ratios out of whack. The problem is no one wants to raise the water bills. The ISPs dont want to raise their customer rates, and the Telecos dont want to raise the amount they have to charge the ISPs. Instead, they want to either make companies, like Netflix, pay for being popular, and throwing the ratios off, or limit access and speeds to these sites by consumers, to get the usage back into a profitable ratio. This is where the concept of Net Neutrality comes in. The Supreme Court ruled that the Telecos could charge the companies providing content directly and/or limit access to them. Effectively turning the Internet backbone into a toll road, where companies that pay get a pike pass, while others get to wait in line. Or can be blocked completely. And remember, there isnt one company that owns the backbone, but dozens. So, Netflix will have to pay them all to reach all customers. Or maybe just pay the bigger ones, because they would still be able to reach most of their customers, and sorry if you, as a consumer, happen to be with an ISP connected to the wrong Teleco. So, essentially Net Neutrality comes down to these two options, either consumers can access whatever they want, and will likely have to pay more for service, or they have their service limited by the Telecos to the content providers that can pay.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 16:06:39 +0000
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