The US has introduced formal and binding net neutrality regulations, so where does Australia stand, and what's it all about anyway?
With so many different interests represented on the internet, it's no surprise that conflicting agendas often collide. The fur has rarely flown as thick and fast as in the debate around net neutrality, a concept that has been batted around for years but gained significant traction last year when the US Federal Communications Commission introduced formal and binding net neutrality regulations on telecommunications providers in that country.
It was a significant moral victory for proponents of net neutrality, a principle that essentially argues that internet service providers (ISPs) should not be able to block or discriminate against certain types of traffic to further their own purposes. Net neutrality has been widely supported by a raft of internet pioneers and no less than US president Barack Obama, but has come under fire from a number of telcos that find it to be an obstruction to their ability to turn a profit from delivering services.
Increasing usage of file-sharing services like BitTorrent have driven a sense of urgency around net neutrality in recent years, with surging volumes of download traffic driving some carriers to throttle back the service they deliver to the heaviest downloaders. In 2007, US ISP Comcast was famously found to be using a traffic-shaping tool from Sandvine to throttle customers' BitTorrent downloads and block them from seeding BitTorrent content altogether.
This sort of behaviour doesn't go down well with users, who generally believe they have bought an internet pipe and should be free to do what they want with it. But this perspective clashes with that of communications and media interests in the US, where effectively unlimited broadband plans have routinely seen consumers downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data per month. In Australia, by contrast, sheer volume has not been such an issue as monthly quotas have long been in place and users know about the throttling that happens when they're exceeded.
While many argue that carriers have legitimate network-performance reasons to want to manage their customers' bandwidth consumption, others have seen such approaches as pretext for greater intervention by the omnipresent online copyright police. Indeed, anti-piracy forces have fought furiously against net neutrality provisions, with media giant Viacom most recently launching a 'Makers Against Takers' campaign on the issue and countless others running on and off.
The net neutrality compromise
Opponents on both sides of the argument can take some relief from the nature of watered-down but, nonetheless, legally binding net neutrality
provisions that were voted in a year ago and were slated to come into force on November 20. These regulations, contained under the banner of '
Open Internet', include three major provisions:
1. Transparency: Fixed and mobile providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics, and commercial terms of their broadband services.
2. No blocking: Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful web sites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services.
3. No unreasonable discrimination: Fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.
One of the first things commentators have flagged about the new regulations is their use of the word "lawful" throughout. This one word keeps the door open for ISPs to block downloading of illegal content such as pirated movies and music – a major win for a content industry that was gravely concerned by the chance that the regulations might cut off a punitive measure against content pirates.
Another standout characteristic is the omission of mobile providers in clause 3. This exemption allows mobile providers to discriminate in service provision – something that they would have argued for long and hard to ensure they retain the right to block heavy users of mobile broadband services. Given the performance hit that accompanies increased usage over limited wireless spectrum, this control will help wireless providers better manage their networks to avoid service logjams.
Yet there are issues with the policy: US carrier Verizon lodged a lawsuit against the provisions while they were still in draft form, but was knocked back because the action was held to be premature. The company re-lodged its complaint in October, but it wasn't the only one to have issues: days earlier, open-media advocacy group
Free Press filed its own complaint, alleging the new regulations didn't go far enough to prevent partisan service providers from using traffic filtering and management tools to impose their own agendas on users.
One area of contention, for example, is VoIP applications. Carriers around the world have a long love/hate relationship with the likes of Skype, with some actually bundling it with their services and others vilifying it as the end of civilisation as we know it.
The truth, of course, lies somewhere between but those supporting unqualified net neutrality fear carriers can detect and slow traffic from Skype and other VoIP and videoconferencing services. They also worry that commercial interests could interfere in service delivery – for example, paying carriers to prioritise advertisements ahead of users' internet traffic, or to prevent the use of certain competing applications.
Imagine Microsoft paying a carrier to block Yahoo! and redirect all www.google.com requests to its own Bing search service; it's an extreme example, but one that shows the kind of user experience manipulation that so scares net neutrality advocates.
The net neutrality debate is certain to remain a contentious one in the US, with its warring interests, big-government fears, and the frequent meddling of media giants with vested interests in controlling access to content and services.
In Australia, discussion on the topic has been less vehement, with observers generally labelling the issue a US problem. Its role in the NBN rollout has been raised, but generally dismissed because that network is a Layer 2 construct and doesn't operate at higher levels of the OSI stack where applications can be filtered.
Yet mobile providers aren't necessarily limiting themselves to its provisions: many are already differentiating traffic in their billing systems to support plans that provide unlimited social-media access, for example. This differentiation could easily be extended to more onerous controls, although high levels of competition and relatively easy service substitution would likely see customers walk.
