What is it and why you should care

Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking anyone: their ISP, their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor. It is of the utmost importance that, if someone connects to the internet, and you connect to the internet, that you can then run any internet application you want, without discrimination as to who you are or what you are doing.

We pay for connection to the Net as though it were a cloud which magically delivers our packets. We may pay for a higher or a lower quality of service. We may pay for a service which has the characteristics of being good for video, or quality audio. But we each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to anyone.

The internet is largely meritocratic in its design. If people like instapundit.com better than cnn.com, that's where they'll go. If they like the search engine A9 better than Google, they vote with their clicks. Is it a problem, then, if the gatekeepers of the internet (in most places, a duopoly of the local phone and cable companies) discriminate between favoured and disfavoured uses of the internet? To take a strong example, would it be a problem if AT&T, a major US telecoms company that also manages a lot of the internet's data backbones and pathways, makes it slower and harder to reach Gmail and quicker and easier to reach Yahoo! mail?

Welcome to the fight over "network neutrality," Washington's current obsession. The debate centres on whether it is more "neutral" to let consumers reach all internet content equally or to let providers discriminate if they think they'll make more money that way.

The cable firms have (to their credit, but under pressure) sworn off blocking web sites. Instead, they propose to carve off bandwidth for their own servicesnamely, televisionand, more controversially, to charge selected companies a toll for "priority" service. Some think there is nothing wrong with that. But critics say technological prioritisation and degradation is the same thingthat given limited room on the network, whoever isn't prioritised is by implication degraded.

In trying to figure out who's right, let's forget about the internet and look at a real-life example. How would you feel if the government announced an exclusive deal with car company to provide a special "rush-hour" lane for cars from say, X, only? That seems intuitively wrong. But what if anything, is the difference between this and the internet?

Two obvious differences are market power and the availability of substitutes. If highways really did choose favourite brands, you might buy a car from X, for example, instead of one from a different brand just to get the rush-hour lane, not necessarily because X makes better cars. As a result, the nature of competition among car-makers would change. Rather than try to make the best product, they would battle to make deals with highways.

That's what would happen if discrimination reigned on the internet: a transformation from a market where innovation rules to one where deal-making rules. Otherwise, markets, where firms rush to make exclusive agreements with companies like AT&T and Verizon instead of trying to improve their products. There's a deeper point here: When who you know matters more than anything, the market is no longer meritocratic and consequently becomes less efficient. At the extreme, a market where centralised actors pick favourites isn't a market at all, but a planned economy.

This is the basic case for network neutralityto prevent centralised control over the future of the internet. If allowing network discrimination means being stuck with AT&T's long-term vision of the internet, it won't be worth it.

The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true.

Let us protect the neutrality of the net. Visit SaveTheInternet.com