Are 'Struck Down' Net Neutrality Laws Good or Bad?

By

Phil Edholm recently wrote an article titled, “The Impact of Net Neutrality Ruling on WebRTC,” where he suggests that it will have a negative effect on new services, such as WebRTC (an open source project to enable the web with real time communication), and other services that compete with your ISP. Just because your ISP is not required to treat all traffic over the Internet connection equally, does not mean it won't.

The U.S. Appeals Court struck down the 2011 FCC rules that all Internet traffic must be treated equally by Internet service providers.  Verizon challenged the regulations since Congress did not give the FCC authority to regulate the Internet. There have been eight bill introduced in Congress between 2006 and 2012 involving net neutrality, and the only one that passed had the net neutrality provision removed from the bill. The FCC seized that power, and, as of today, the court has put the FCC in it's place.

Creating a net neutrality law is not trivial. ISPs regularly treat some traffic differently than others. A good example is “spam”. If your ISP filters spam from email, are they treating that data differently? Will the ISP be violating the net neutrality law? Can it be brought up on civil or criminal charges?

A fear from this ruling is that it will lead to, “tiered service” for specific types of traffic. In tiered service, the consumer or business pays extra for better service. We have tiered service today. I pay an extra $10.00 to my cable company, and they give me faster service. You probably have that option from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), too. If you are a business, you have multiple options of DSL speed, fractional or full T1s and T3s, etc. You also have the option of a “Service Level Agreement” (SLA), where your ISP can guarantee you some number of “9s” of uptime (your service is up 99.999 percent of the time) and of various data latencies. Of course you pay extra for the better tiers, and if the Internet goes down, those higher paying customers with an SLA are going to be fixed first.

Likewise, if you have a website, the ISP that hosts your site could limit your speed or your volume. ISPs regularly enter in to agreements to “peer” (I will handle your traffic if you handle mine) if their traffic is fairly symmetrical, or an ISP might pay for “transit” to connect to their other networks or other parts of the country, or even to host a site on their network to decrease speed and latency for the ISP's customers.

What some in the industry believe is that an ISP will intentionally block or degrade (they call it “traffic shaping”) certain services, like WebRTC, that compete with products from the ISP. So far, this has been a non-problem, and what history shows us is that if it is even suspected that an ISP is not treating all services equally, there will be industry and media attention, and calls for Congressional action. And ISPs don't want Congressional action.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. [Free eNews Subscription]
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
Related Articles

How to Protect Your Website From LDAP Injection Attacks

By: Contributing Writer    3/12/2024

Prevent LDAP injection attacks with regular testing, limiting access privileges, sanitizing user input, and applying the proper encoding functions.

Read More

Azure Cost Optimization: 5 Things You Can Do to Save on Azure

By: Contributing Writer    3/7/2024

Azure cost optimization is the process of managing and reducing the overall cost of using Azure. It involves understanding the resources you're using,…

Read More

Massive Meta Apps and Services Outage Impacts Users Worldwide

By: Alex Passett    3/5/2024

Meta's suite of apps and services are experiencing major global outages on Super Tuesday 2024.

Read More

The Role of Technology in Shaping the Future of Affiliate Marketing

By: Contributing Writer    3/5/2024

In the current rapidly growing digital world, affiliate marketing is still one of the most effective ways for businesses to increase their visibility …

Read More

The Steps You Can Take To Improve Customer Service For Your Business

By: Contributing Writer    3/5/2024

When you're in a competitive market, providing exceptional customer service is crucial for the success and growth of your business. Good customer serv…

Read More