ISP's are companies. Why should they care?

                My previous posts discussed some of the important goals that the internet was founded on: being a place to view the world’s information without restriction. In this post I would like to discuss another extremely important goal that the internet set to achieve, and that is fairness.

                In the internet’s initial implementation, one of the founding ideas was that every packet of data was treated as such. There weren't high priority packets, or packets you could just drop because you felt like that, there were just packets. All packets would be treated equally. Reflecting on the internet’s progress today shows us a bustling network of innovation and resiliency. Much of that success is to be credited to the goals adhered to since the beginning of the internet for fairness, right?

This is a topic that is heavily debated today, especially after Internet Service Providers have started experimenting with the pre-existing rules of the internet to see how far they could get. “On October 19, 2007, for instance, the Associated Press (AP) reported that Comcast, the United States' largest cable TV operator and second largest Internet provider, had interfered with users' access to file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent.” (Choi, 447) In this circumstance, Comcast blocked users from accessing BitTorrent once they reached a certain threshold of usage for the month, since this traffic was overwhelming their network’s other normal-use traffic. Not only does this appear to be a valid concern and means of solving the problem, it is also backed with the fact that the majority of BitTorrent usage is to distribute copyrighted material illegally. For this reason, torrent throttling is generally an accepted behavior for ISP's.

             Once ISP's made one step in the direction of treating some packets differently, they saw how far they could go. As a business distributing content, like TV networks, they decided that they should be able to gain priority services which had reserved resources to ensure that they always ran smoothly and quickly. This high-priority internet fast-lane resembles the way that TV networks have content that makes the most money on the channel more frequently, rather than allocating all time slots evenly among any potential content. ISP's could promote their own content over others’, as well as charge to have a content provider’s data travel faster and with high priority to their users. Something to realize about this approach is that “networks are complex systems, tying up network elements in one part of the network can have an adverse impact on portions of the network located far from the element being accessed.” (Spulber, 1904) As a result of this, all other traffic would be splitting a smaller portion of the entire ISP's network resources, and slow down. Also, relating back to the TV analogy, “such a payment structure would result in the Internet increasingly resembling today’s mass media, where a few Internet service providers (ISP's) control what the customers effectively may access.” (Cheng, 1) Eventually one could imagine that only content providers with the money to pay the ISP could get their content on the internet.

                One of the greatest aspects of the internet is its competitive potential between any content providers, due to the fairness of the internet itself. Any startup, even with limited resources, can challenge the heavyweight competitor in its field, since they both have the same distribution platform. This is arguably the reason why new innovations arise from the internet so quickly, as new content providers continually challenge old ones to innovate to stay relevant and ahead of the others.

Sources:

Spulber, Daniel F., and Christopher S. Yoo. "Mandating Access to Telecom and the Internet: The Hidden Side of Trinko." Columbia Law Review 107.8 (2007): 1822-907. Print.

Choi, Jay Pil, and Byung-Cheol Kim. "Net Neutrality and Investment Incentives." The RAND Journal of Economics 41.3 (2010): 446-71. Print.

Guo, Hong, Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay,, Hsing K. Cheng, and Yu‑Chen Yang. "Net Neutrality and Vertical Integration of Content and Broadband Services." Journal of Management Information Systems 27.2 (2010): 243-75. Print.