A Neutral Net or Not?

Governments and private interests continue to explore the necessity of tiered Internet access to provide differential quality of service based on the status of the consumer.

An image of a person holding a protest sign that says

Canadian consumers have joined their peers in the US, UK and beyond to argue against tiered access to the Internet as proposed by some carriers. Deep packet inspection and traffic shaping are two practices opponents argue carriers have used to impose a type of de facto tiered access. Image: Flickr/JasonWalton

As far back as the early 1990s, conflicts have existed regarding ISPs’ obligation to allow access to its network by all applications and services publicly available on the Internet. As infrastructure build-out investment has increased, usage and traffic levels climbed, and competition increased, carriers in different parts on the world have argued for the need to charge different tariffs for different classes of service, and to be able to restrict or charge more for bandwidth intensive applications. While the political arguments ebb and flow around the issue, forecasted bandwidth crunches in coming years have raised the question of maintaining equal access principals.

Signals:

Since 2005, carriers in the US, Canada and the UK in particular have been pushing back against government requirements to maintain open access to networks, provoked by the increasingly powerful presence of companies such as Google and Skype that have not invested as much in network infrastructure.
In various countries, bidding for new wireless spectrum has triggered fights about the responsibilities of winning bidders to allow most activities over the networks which will use this spectrum.
The explosive growth of online video and peer-to-peer services has driven carriers to question whether they should pay for the network infrastructure to carry services they do not benefit from.

Implications:

Even under the current regimes worldwide, many carriers have selectively blocked or “throttled” certain services seen as being parasitic on their networks. One impact of this has been to encourage hacking and other means of subverting these controls.
Concerns have been raised that creating clearly tiered access levels with differential charging may creating disparities based on economics, with lower income users having less access to broadband-enabled services and content, such as online video, IPTV and Voice over IP.
Carriers are becoming more circumspect about their willingness to invest in new infrastructure, potentially holding back new services and exacerbating future capacity issues.

Countertrends:

Governments more focused on consumer protection, such as the current US administration and some in Europe, have continued to enforce a neutral Internet.

Extrapolations:

Tiered access would resemble a turbocharged version of the dial-up access era, with major speed and cost diferentials resulting in “haves” and “have nots,” with pockets of fast access and rich applications and next generation services segregated from slower access areas or households locked out of some services based on high costs.