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COLUMN: OPEN EYE - Neutral debate
In the first of a regular column for European Communications, Ian Scales looks at why the
debates surrounding network neutrality produce so much more passion in the US than in Europe
Just when we thought the ‘Internet neutrality' debate had finally exhausted itself, it reared up unexpectedly in late summer. US cable company Comcast's dabs were apparently found on some disrupted Bittorrent (a popular P2P application) file exchanges and then someone extracted a ‘confession' from a slightly confused executive to the effect that the back-room boys might have been doing some traffic-shaping. Bah! spat the blogosphere. This was clearly a deliberate attempt to degrade a competitor (Bittorrent is effectively another way to distribute video, the cable companies' core offering) and a foretaste of things to come unless there is Internet neutrality regulation. The ensuing argument was predictably measured and sober. The ‘Nazis' were implicated: "First they came for the Bittorrent users," intoned one blogger, "but I said nothing because I didn't use Bittorrent, then they came for the... (and so on)."
There's been lots of that sort of thing from the US but in Europe, while there have been raised voices, there's never been the same fury and hyperbole around Internet neutrality issues. Cultural and political differences play a big part - Internet neutrality is often linked to freedom of speech in the US and there's a long tradition of grassroots, anti-monopoly sentiment (absent in Europe). But even so there's a noticeable difference in atmosphere and I think telecom competition (or the lack of it) is at the bottom of it. In Europe, with glaring exceptions, competition seems to be at least going in the right direction, especially in the UK. In the US, after decades of liberalization and competition, the general opinion is that the market is in reverse gear and there is much talk of the old monopolies re-establishing themselves and a growing feeling of revolution betrayed. Ever since early 2006 when the, then, AT&T chairman and chief executive Ed Whitacre started talking about the need for extra payments from Microsoft or Google for high quality content delivery, the more excitable end of the pro-Internet neutrality brigade have been on red alert - the Comcast incident looked like the first signs of a shakedown. As to the Internet neutrality argument itself, it's notoriously difficult to pin down. Some of it goes around in circles and some of it is just stupid. And if the ‘pro' brigade are capable of a little hyperbole, the ‘antis' are even worse, blatantly misrepresenting the whole concept of neutrality as a communist plot and garnishing their arguments with predictions of an imminent Internet collapse and/or the drying up of network investment (both of which have always been about to happen since about 1993, but never do).
On the other side of the argument, Internet history is actually littered with players shelling out to gain a performance advantage for their applications or users, and on each occasion there has been a grumbling chorus. The introduction of ‘private' peering where, instead of exchanging traffic at delay-prone public peering points, players simply peered ‘privately', was one such. It was the same with content delivery networks that offered ‘better than best effort'. Wedges with thin ends were grimly forecast. What's different now is that the backstop of broadband ISP choice is felt to be lacking in the US - many users claim they have just one possible provider, two at most, and therefore market forces alone aren't enough to keep the big ISPs honest. And they probably have a point. In the UK, BT's decision to rearrange itself into retail and wholesale arms with the establishment of Openreach has helped foster an atmosphere of grown-up retail competition. From a truly awful total of a few tens of thousand lines just three years ago, BT's competitors have now unbundled well over 3 million lines. Rightly or wrongly that's generated the perception of real broadband choice and there seems to be a lack of angst amongst UK Internet users as a result. If my broadband ISP starts to exhibit Nazi impulses, I can probably go to another (unless I'm somewhere really remote). So for the time being, and thanks mostly to a clued-up Dutchman, the UK seem to have cracked the regulatory conundrum. Now we'll see if Viv Reding can sell the concept to the rest of Europe, and maybe even the US?
Ian Scales is a freelance communications journalist, editor and author.
He can be contacted via: i.scales@ntlworld.com
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