Some fear that the thorny 'net neutrality question' now poses a palpable threat to online democracy
Readers with long memories will recall the celebrated Schleswig-Holstein question. This referred to a bundle of thorny diplomatic and other issues arising from the relations of two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, to the Danish crown and to the German Confederation. It was the bane of diplomats' lives in the late 19th century, but we remember it nowadays mainly because of Lord Palmerston's famous wisecrack about it. "The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated," he said, "that only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it."
The issue of "net neutrality" is the Schleswig-Holstein question de nos jours. The problem is not that it is so complicated that only three people understand it; au contraire, thousands claim to comprehend it and therein lies the difficulty: their "understandings" differ so markedly, one from another. Some see neutrality as a sacred principle that defines the spirit of the open internet and explains its astonishing ability to stimulate disruptive innovation. At the other extreme, multimedia corporations ? and some distinguished computer scientists ? see it as a sacred cow that may hamper future rounds of innovation in online services.
To appreciate the issue, we need to remember that the internet was designed to perform a single task ? it takes in data packets at one end and does its best to deliver them to their destinations. Net neutrality means that the network should be agnostic about the content of the packets. It shouldn't care whether they contain fragments of emails, web pages, instant messages, music tracks, porn videos ? whatever. As far as the network is concerned, they're just data packets and should receive equal treatment. According to this doctrine, any departure from this digital egalitarianism should be regarded with great suspicion. So, for example, if your ISP gave preferential treatment to data packets from the BBC iPlayer as against those from 4oD, it would be violating the doctrine, as it would if it took payments from Microsoft to prioritise Bing search results over those from Google.
Every time a government agency dips a toe in the neutrality pond, there's a cacophony of contradictory reactions. And so it proved last week. On Tuesday, the US Federal Communications Commission, which has the power to set the rules for internet use in the US, issued a ruling which administered the latest kick to the hornets' nest. In an admirably succinct summary, my Guardian colleague Charles Arthur puts it thus: the FCC "seems to have done the right thing ? defending neutrality ? for fixed-line broadband, but fumbled it on mobile". This is because the proposed rules "seem to allow mobile carriers to decide that they can introduce pay-per-service charges, so that Skype or YouTube or Facebook might be charged to get their content on to the networks; alternatively (or perhaps additionally), users who wanted those services might find themselves being charged extra. That, obviously, means that those services are not being treated in a 'neutral' way. Which means that you don't have net neutrality."
Or, to put in another way, the FCC seems to have endorsed net neutrality for the past (fixed-line internet connections) while abandoning it for the future.
Does this matter? Yes, because while most people still get their internet connections via fixed-line broadband, the likelihood is that in 10 years' time a majority will access the net via wireless connections. And if the FCC ruling stands, the wireless sphere will be anything but neutral. It will be dominated by the carriers ? the telcos ? who see no merit in neutrality. Which is why some people feel that the FCC's decision effectively means kissing goodbye to the open internet. "The neutering of the internet is now the unofficial policy of the Federal Communications Commission," writes Dan Gillmor, for example. "Contrary to the happy talk from FCC chairman Julius Genachowski... the move is well underway to turn the internet into a regulated playground for corporate giants."
Sceptics about net neutrality will doubtless portray this as an over-reaction. Until I read Tim Wu's new book ? The Master Switch: the Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf, 2010) ? I might have agreed with them. But Professor Wu places all this in a more sombre context ? of what he calls the Cycle. "History shows," he writes, "a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel ? from open to closed system."
Will the internet prove to be immune to Tim Wu's Cycle? I wouldn't bet on it.
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