Net Neutrality: Who will control the Internet?

You and your neighbor, Joe, use the Internet. Joe logs on to the Net (as it is called) to play video games and watch movies. He is on the Net for most of his waking hours.

In contrast, you occasionally log on to the Internet to send and receive emails and photos. By virtue of the Internet being a shared resource, Joe is using more of a community pool than you. Video games and movies consume considerably more of the Internet's capacity than email and pictures.

The two of you are paying close to the same amount of money to use the Internet. At first glance, this arrangement is of no consequence. What do you care about Joe's couch potato habits? With only Joe and you in the neighborhood using the Net, you are not aware of this unbalanced sharing of Internet bandwidth (the term used to describe Internet's capacity to support user traffic).

But it is not just Joe in your neighborhood who is, as the Internet geeks say, "hogging bandwidth."

Other neighbors, such as Jim, John, and Jane are watching Netflix movies. During times when your neighbors are enjoying "Avatar" and such, you notice it takes longer, much longer, to send and receive your email and photos. Why? Because your neighbors (and millions of other Internet users) are consuming more bandwidth than you.

Yet Joe, Jim, John, and Jane are paying roughly the same amount of money each month as you do for Internet usage. Is that fair? Their lifestyles affect your lifestyle. Does that make sense? Let's explore this issue in a bit more detail. In so doing, we will reveal the mysteries surrounding this unrestricted practice. It is called "Net neutrality."

The issue of Net neutrality is a prominent topic in the news. The legacy of unrestricted and relatively free use of the Internet is breaking down. This issue and its resolution will affect every user of the Internet, including companies and individuals.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, 81 percent of the United States adult population (called end-users in this article) logs on to the Internet.

Rulings and legislation on Net neutrality are coming forth from Washington, D.C. The FCC and Congress, with the courts refereeing, are debating if companies which transport emails, movies, phone calls, and other images through the Internet can create and enforce rules on how this traffic is delivered. General discussions and findings have been made available for public comment. The FCC anticipates having its final rulings in place by the end of 2014.

In a nutshell, what comes forth from the FCC will affect how companies and individuals use the Internet. The FCC will determine if the consumers of Internet bandwidth will have to pay more for using additional bandwidth. The FCC rulings might also determine if the Internet will be restricted in how it is used, such as giving Joe higher priority for watching "Avatar" than for your sending a photo to a friend. With 81 percent of America's citizens using the Internet, this issue is not a trivial matter.

These potential restrictions raise many questions, some of which run counter to the legacy of the relatively free use of the Net. The issues are complex and bring up scores of legal, technical, social, and political questions. Notwithstanding these complexities, the issues boil down to: Who will control the Internet?

Here is a summary of the issues, using Joe and you as example guinea pigs:

* Possibly giving precedence to Joe's video traffic over your photo traffic: Discriminating between different types of traffic.

* Possibly slowing the delivery of one party's traffic (your photo), but speeding-up the delivery of traffic from another party (Joe's movie): Discriminating between different users' traffic.

Net neutrality means the companies that provide Internet services - such as Comcast, Netflix, Google, Verizon, and AOL - treat all traffic on the Internet the same way. There is no discrimination based on traffic from a company or an individual. There is no discrimination on the amount and/or type of traffic sent through the Internet. This means all individuals and organizations have equal access to the Internet's bandwidth.

The allocation of bandwidth is based on the traffic itself. Joe's Netflix movie gets more bandwidth than your email, but you and Joe generally pay the same fee to use the Net's bandwidth. (Exceptions exist, and Internet providers have different rates. I am working with a general model for this article.)

Historically, the Internet has been neutral to these issues. From its inception, the design has been that of a best-effort delivery service for any kind of traffic, regardless of the sender or receiver(s) of the traffic. Some exceptions exist, such as flow-controlling traffic to prevent saturation and network congestion, but this kind of discrimination has been applied to all traffic, regardless of its diversity. In addition, managing traffic has been a simple task, because Internet traffic traditionally consisted of short email messages or file transfers of modest sizes.

Not so today. Long-gone is the Internet that once transported only end-user emails and small files to people sitting at semi-teletype workstations. Today, these applications must share the Internet's bandwidth with interactive games, movies and TV shows, photo downloads and phone conversations. Indeed, traffic diversity and varying requirements for this traffic are a big part of the Net neutrality issue.

The problem with unrestricted use of the Internet's capacity is that your neighbors and you (and millions of others) are sharing a finite resource (the Internet's bandwidth). One reason (and a common occurrence) is that you are sharing a physical channel with your neighbors, such as the telephone line or TV cable running through your neighborhood (as well as servers and other machines). As mentioned at the introduction to this article, your neighbors' hogging of this shared bandwidth is being done at your expense. It this arrangement fair? That is a big part of the Net neutrality debate.

Tomorrow's article will explore this question in more detail.

Uyless Black is an award-winning author who has written many books on computer software and advanced communication technologies. He was a software programmer for the Federal Reserve and a consulting business owner in California and Virginia. He resides in Coeur d'Alene.