An Essay on Network Neutrality

An Essay on Network Neutrality copyright © Brian Nez, 2008. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

The History Behind Network Neutrality

Network Neutrality, usually just referred to as net neutrality, is a relatively new issue in the United States compared to some of the other problems that public policy has taken on and solved in the past. Unfortunately, this fact has caused many to regard network neutrality as a passing issue, one that would ultimately solve itself without any government intervention. In reality, however, net neutrality is a very serious issue that has the ability to affect nearly everyone in this quickly growing digital world.

Beginning with the invention of the telegram in the 1860s, the underlying ideas behind network neutrality became embedded in American communication systems. Under United States law, providers of telegram – and later telephone – services were classified as “common carriers”. This means that all communications that passed through them were treated with equal importance no matter what the source, destination, or contents of the message may be.

As electronic communication became widespread throughout America, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) via the Communications Act of 1934. The purpose of the FCC was to regulate all radio spectrum use and to manage interstate communications.

On April 30, 1993, the invention of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN marked the beginning of the rapid growth in demand for consumer Internet service. At the time, Internet service was viewed by the FCC – and thus American law – as a subset of the telecommunications sector. This concept would last for only a short period of time.

With the growing demand for high-speed broadband connections, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) looked for mediums other than telephone-based dial-up over which they could deliver Internet connectivity. Such mediums included the cable in use by television services and unused spectrum on the copper wire in use by telephone companies. These two methods of providing connectivity became known as Cable Internet and Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) respectively. Both of these Internet-capable mediums were already deployed widely throughout America and so they quickly became the primary choice for consumers seeking broadband connections.

An important difference between Cable Internet and DSL at the time, was that the FCC viewed Cable Internet as an Information Service, while DSL remained classified as a Telecommunications Service. Under current law, Information Service Providers were not subject to the obligations involved with being a common carrier. After intense lobbying from DSL-based ISPs, the FCC removed their common carrier obligations by reclassifying DSL as an Information Service on August 5, 2005 – thus putting it on the same playing field as Cable Internet. After DSL providers became free of the restriction of having to be a common carrier, the net neutrality debate suddenly became the center of attention for Internet, fair-market, and anti-censorship activists.

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My ThinkPad T41 running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger x86)

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