Net Neutrality: Global Information Society Watch 2008 Report

This report, written as a chapter for Global Information Society Watch 2008 Report, describes net neutrality as the principle of letting all internet traffic flow equally and impartially, without discrimination. It allows internet users to access any web content or applications they choose, without restriction or limitation. Though users in quite a number of countries are affected by government-controlled censorship of the internet, the debate is reported to be most intense in the United States (US) and has global implications because any restrictions or limitations applied in the US would affect the worldwide internet community and economy.


Net neutrality may be affected by charging premiums for faster connections to access certain content, slowing other content down. Critics of the net neutrality regulation debate, including large telecommunications carriers, "say that this cannot happen in a competitive market, and that competition rather than regulation should be the answer to ensuring net neutrality. However, the recent consolidation in the [telecom] sector, especially in the US, is giving rise to exactly this concern: that the level of competition may be compromised to an extent that will not guarantee net neutrality in the future."


Those who favour net neutrality include the developing world, the general public, global business, a number of major providers, some non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and some US politicians. (For example, one leading presidential candidate, characterised here as anti-net-neutrality-regulation, received more donations from US telecom companies, but this amount was outweighed by the contributions of these companies' employees to his opponent's campaign, showing the differing positions of the telecom business and its employees.)

Net neutrality legislation is criticised by some politicians and telecom providers, as well as internet service providers (ISPs) and leading internet inventors, network engineers, hardware manufacturers, and other business groups, based on a quality-of-service issue. "They claim the internet was not designed to handle the bandwidth-intensive applications that are becoming commonplace these days, such as video-on-demand, peer-to-peer (P2P) networking, or online games, and that they must be allowed to control their quality of service by offering differentiated (or tiered) services to their customers....In the view of net neutrality opponents, government regulation to prevent a tiered internet would remove the incentive to invest in network infrastructure and to develop improvements to it." They claim that the playing field is already skewed because delay-sensitive applications, such as voice and live video, are given priority over data applications that do not require transmission in real-time. Calls via the internet to national emergency numbers may be given an even higher priority. "If network operators cannot install infinite transmission capacity, they must rather develop the network infrastructure incrementally according to demand". Those favouring a tiered payment-for-speed/bandwidth system argue that the larger revenue would contribute to faster infrastructure building capacity and would ultimately reduce consumer costs, as it has with mobile phones.


Many who favour net neutrality, as stated here, do not favour enforcement by legislation. "However, many participants in the net neutrality debate confuse regulating the internet as such with regulating the telecommunications infrastructure that it uses....Regulation is only necessary where competition has failed or has not yet developed - and this is often the case with the telecommunications infrastructure that the internet uses." In short, because most telecommunications infrastructure was originally built through monopolistic ownership and funding before competition was introduced, the earliest incumbent providers own the infrastructure and can keep out new competitors. A solution described here is the structural separation of the incumbent telco. This means splitting it up into two independent entities: a retail service provider on the one hand, and on the other, a separate entity that owns and operates the network infrastructure and provides wholesale services to other service providers, including the former incumbent’s retail division. Another avenue is called local loop unbundling (LLU or ULL) regulation, which can guarantee alternative service providers fair and open access to the incumbent’s local network infrastructure.

Particularly in developing countries, as stated here, a concern has been the obstruction of competition by incumbent telcos to protect their traditional voice telephony business against new service providers using voice over internet protocol (VoIP). “The regulatory authorities in many developing countries are relatively weak and often fail to enforce existing regulations.” In the US, consolidation has resulted in two major telcos controlling approximately 80% of the digital subscriber line (DSL) market and rapidly taking market share from the cable companies, leaving a degradation of competition.