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Andrew Lackey

Professor Malcolm Campbell

English 1104

5 April 2017

A Free Web: How Businesses Thrive on Net Neutrality

The internet is about to undergo a massive renovation. The only problem is that this

renovation will not appeal to us, the average web-user, nor will it appeal to the thousands of

small-business owners who need an online presence to succeed and create new jobs for the

United States. Net neutrality, the subject that unifies, strengthens, and builds upon the foundation

of the internet, is under attack. Judges, internet service providers, even the U.S. President, are

attempting to reconstruct the internet into a system that does not favor the job growth trends we

have seen for the past two decades.

Before going into the details, net neutrality and the roles of both the Federal

Communications Commission (FCC) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) need to be addressed.

Net neutrality is the concept of having all internet activity treated the same by ISPs (Time

Warner Cable, Verizon, Cox, etc.), and therefore everyone who chooses to use the internet will

browse at relatively the same speed and will not be subject to unfairly-low bandwidth volumes.

Think of an ISP like a water-supply company they provide internet bandwidth, which can be

characterized as pipes. Large pipes conserve water pressure (internet speed) which allow families

to cook, clean, and water the plants at the same time, without much hassle. These activities

equate to multi-tasking on the internet: where streaming video, listening to music, and emailing a

professor all at once require a lot of bandwidth (Chelsea).

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(Open Internet). Net neutrality originated from that of telephone operators, whose job was to

connect phone calls no matter who was on the line. Telephone operators did not discriminate

from any type of phone activity, making it possible for me to call to my mother just as easily as

calling my drug dealer (theoretically, of course). The same has held true for ISPs; they provide

the fiber-optic networks that produce high-speed internet, which web-users pay for by yearly

subscription, and do nothing regarding what content actually transmits on their network. This

internet tradition maintains its integrity though the oversight of the FCC.

The Communications Act of 1934 established what is known as the Federal

Communications Commission, also known as the FCC. There are three parts of this law that

make it legal for the FCC to regulate the internet. The first part is Title II, which establishes the

right for the FCC to regulate and enforce rules to common carriers a person or company that

transports goods and services. The second part is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which

was simply a revision of Title II making the internet relevant to the FCC (Open Internet). Net

neutrality wasnt even acknowledged, by law, until 2015 when the FCC decided to classify ISPs

as common carriers. So how was there net neutrality before 2015? What upheld the concept of

net neutrality from 1998 to 2015 was the Communications Decency Act, or CDA (Section 230 of

the Communications Decency Act). This third piece of legislation informally created a net

neutral internet, thanks to porn. Internet porn was growing rapidly in the mid 1990s, and

congress needed to design a law that appealed to the 1st amendment but also appealed to

protecting children from indecent content. Congress used CDA to establish a set of rules, which

would be enforced by the FCC, that protected children from obscene materials, protected ISPs

from being liable for the adult content, and to protect the free-speech of the pornographic content

creators. When the dust settled, ISPs were barred from restricting the content found on their
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networks and pornographic material was up-held by our right to free-speech, which inevitably

equipped the FCC to enforce net neutrality where entrepreneurs, content creators, and web

users could freely share content and enjoy equal opportunity that helps build business, even if its

porn.

Before 2015, what helped maintain a free-web in the last decade was ex-President

Obamas push for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to recognize ISPs as a common carrier. When

that decision was made by the FCC, and through multiple court rulings, three bright-line rules

came into play: ISPs can not block, throttle, or use paid prioritization when dealing with their

broadband networks (Open Internet). This means that they cannot block any legal content, as that

was initially established by CDA in 1998; throttle, or vary the speed of internet across websites;

or prioritize sites by offering to put them in fast-lanes in return for money (Fung). Obamas

interest in protecting the free-internet through these bright-line rules stems from the popular

belief that the internet is the cornerstone to innovation and that net neutrality creates an equal

playing field for entrepreneurs, writers, activists, and businesses (Somanader). On the other

hand, we have ISPs vying for complete control of this so-called playing field. ISPs are looking

to turn an all-inclusive, intramural flag football game into the NFL Super Bowl. It is a game

between recruiting only the top businesses on the market, versus giving equal opportunity for

anyone to create content online. They are looking to appeal these bright line rules for the sake of

maximizing profit and claim to improve innovation. However, these actions might prove to be

counter-intuitive, and apparently quite destructive, according to a law review written by Brigham

Young University. It is true that broadband providers advance their systems, but this comes in

reaction to the demands of content creators and web-users. If ISPs were allowed to discriminate

the amount of bandwidth given to application creators the market prices for such content would
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rise, making overall development decrease and less information available; this would

inevitably cause innovation to suffer (Cano, 728).

Many businesses are highly dependent on these bright- line rules. A website, created by

Stanford University, devoted to dissecting the net neutrality argument gives multiple reasons why

de-regulating ISPs would slow competition on the internet and give control to a couple very

powerful and very wealthy corporations. Ridding the internet of net neutrality would essentially

give ISPs the ability to act as content gatekeepers (Iskander). Today, web-users and content

creators see the internet as one stable interface, allowing them to transport to any location

imaginable without restriction. However when ISPs are given the option to pick and choose who

gets the most bandwidth, the internet becomes tiered like wedding cake. this will prompt

companies to pay for high-speed internet, small-businesses will be left in the figurative fiber-

optic dust that large, wealthy corporations stir up. Successful online businesses such as Google,

Netflix, and YouTube will have the option to be placed on a pedestal and reign over the

businesses that cannot afford the fees that ISPs place on their networks; and because they are

unregulated, their profits will be tremendous. From a users point of view, the internet will no

longer be homogeneous. It will resemble something like my bedroom with clothes scattered all

over my floor, the only place I would want to be is my nice warm bed next the window which

oversees a beautiful spring morning. Of course, my clothes are symbolizing the small businesses

overlooked by me, the web-user, and my bed is representing the one location on the internet that

is even remotely enjoyable or convenient. With net neutrality, my mom will act as the FCC she

will clean my room for me and make every square-inch a place in which I can roam freely,

without restriction. Just like having a specific cable TV subscription, where only certain content

is available to the subscriber, without FCC regulation ISP subscriptions will look similar, only in
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web form. Of course, no one knows exactly how the internet would function or look like without

the FCC because courts usually favor their regulations and push for net neutrality.

Those who oppose net neutrality claim that competition and innovation are hindered.

When it comes to paying for internet service via ISP, think of it like Golden Coral an all-you-

can-eat buffet (Wasserman). Large and small people alike, they all pay the same price but for

different amounts of food. Comparing this to bandwidth usage, sites that use the most bandwidth

such as Netflix and YouTube (using up 37.1% and 17.9% of all bandwidth data, respectively)

theoretically pay the same price to hold their domain as every other site (Edwards). Robert Khan,

the co-inventor to Internet-Protocol (IP), stresses that because ISPs are forced to provide the

same network capabilities to everyone, the incentive to innovate and improve upon their fiber-

optic networks becomes stale (Iskander). However, I will argue that the incentive for ISPs to

improve their networks and bring in costly engineers to do the job is most definitely derived

from keeping the web neutral. It is also valuable to point out that internet consumers choose for

themselves who their ISP will be, and that is also where competition may come from. The reality

is that most Americans cannot tell the difference between two ISPs, and I believe it is within an

ISPs best interest to provide consumers with accurate and easily understood advertisements to

maximize membership, but I digress. An ISPs incentive to innovate will come from the need to

provide consumers with the best possible network because if they dont they will lose customers

and inevitably go out of business. Marc Andreessen, a successful founder of the internet software

company Netscape, claims If you have these pure net neutrality rules where you can never

charge a company like Netflix anything, youre not ever going to get a return on continued

network investment (Cowen). The problem with this statement is that charging a fee to the few

companies who use the most bandwidth will not compare to how much revenue an ISP is already
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making on the data plans web-users pay for. Another way that competition is said to be hindered

is through the creation of new ISPs. For anyone to start their own ISP it will take millions of

dollars, multiple licenses and contracts, and fiber-optic know-how to even compete with the large

companies today (Brodkin). Looking at a recent report, ISPs might not need this type of

competition to have an incentive to innovate. It is reasonable to assume that ISPs will innovate

without competition, according to McKinsey Global Institute research. This institution found that

the best course of action for public sector leaders would be to promote broad access to the

Internet, since Internet usage, quality of [broadband] infrastructures, and Internet expenditure are

correlated with higher growth in per capita GDP (Manyika). When online activity continues to

grow, because of FCC regulations to keep the internet neutral, ISPs will be forced to maintain

bandwidth networks and secure domains at a reasonable speed that adapts to the changing

bandwidth usage of growing businesses. This is exactly what The McKinsey Global Institute

found net neutrality gives equal opportunity to all businesses, which shows a collateral affect to

GDP growth and an incentive for ISPs to maintain their networks.

It seems there is substantial evidence and support by multiple sources to suggest that net

neutrality benefits the majority of people. It is dangerous to see ISPs blinded by the assumed

increase in their profit, given when FCC regulations are taken out of question, because it is

shown that their stance in policy will only cater to large corporations. There is hope that these

policies remain intact for as long as the internet lives, so that people may continue to create new

products, share their ideas, and innovate to their hearts content.

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Works Cited

Bradley, Tony. Weighing the Economic Impact of Net Neutrality. PC World, IDG,

27 April 2010.

www.pcworld.com/article/195079/weighing_the_economic_impact_of__net_neutrality.html.

Accessed 1 March 2017.

Berkman, Fran. "Why net neutrality activists are pushing for Title II classification for ISPs." The Daily

Dot. The Daily Dot, 11 Dec. 2015. https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/what-is-title-ii-net-

neutrality-fcc/. Accessed 1 April 2017.

Brodkin, Jon "One big reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is really hard." Ars Technica.

Cond Nast, 06 April 2014. https://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/one-big-reason-we-lack-

internet-competition-starting-an-isp-is-really-hard/. Accessed 1 April 2017.

Cano, Emma N. Saving the Internet: Why Regulating Broadband Providers Can Keep the Internet

Open. Brigham Young University Law Review, vol 2016, no. 2, pp. 711-740.

librarylink.uncc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=a9h&AN=117697368&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Chelsea. "What is Bandwidth?" The Beacon. Vweb, 18 May 2016. http://fios.verizon.com/beacon/what-

is-bandwidth/. Accessed 1 April 2017.

Cowen, Tyler. "Marc Andreessen on net neutrality." Marginal Revolution. WordPress, 22 May 2014.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/marc-andreessen-on-net-

neutrality.html. Accessed 1 April 2017.

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Edwards, Jim. "Court Ends 'Net Neutrality' On A Technicality." Business Insider. Business Insider, 14

Jan. 2014. http://www.businessinsider.com/simple-explanation-of-net-neutrality-2014-4.

Accessed 1 April 2017.

Fung, Brian. "Net neutrality takes effect today. Heres how it affects you." The Washington Post. WP

Company, 12 June 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/06/12/net-

neutrality-takes-effect-today-heres-how-it-affects-you/?utm_term=.412febc94714. Accessed 1

April 2017.

Iskandar, Tatiana, Lee Semien, and Daniel Vinegrad. Net Neutrality. Stanford U,

cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/NetNeutrality/index.html. nd. Date

Accessed 1 March 2017.

Kang, Cecilia. Court Backs Rules Treating Internet as Utility, Not Luxury. nytimes, 14 June 2016,

www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/technology/net-neutrality-fcc-appeals-court-ruling.html.

Accessed 15 March 2017

Manyika, James, Matthieu Plissi du Rausas, Eric Hazan, Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Rmi

Said. Internet matters: The Net's sweeping impact on growth, jobs, and prosperity.

McKinsey&Company. McKinsey&Company, May 2011.

http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/internet-matters. Accessed 1 April

2017.

"Open Internet." Federal Communications Commission. N.p., 25 Aug. 2016.

https://www.fcc.gov/general/open-internet. Accessed 05 Apr. 2017.

"Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act." Electronic Frontier Foundation. N.p., n.d.

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230. Accessed 1 April 2017.

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Somanader, Tanya. A Free and Open Internet: What You Need to Know About Net Neutrality.

ObamaWhiteHouse. N.p., 10 November 2014,

obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/11/10/free-and-open-internet-what-you-need-know-

about-net-neutrality. Accessed 1 March 2017.

Smith, Craig. "105 Amazing Netflix Statistics and Facts." ExpandedRamblings. DMR, 01 March 2017.

http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/netflix_statistics-facts/. Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.

Wasserman, Todd. "5 Arguments Against Net Neutrality." Mashable. Mashable, Inc., 16 May 2014.

http://mashable.com/2014/05/16/5-arguments-against-net-neutrality/#.0bilmiHtmqt. Accessed 1

April 2017.