I've seen a lot of reactions following the repeal of the net neutrality bill and since i have a background in telecommunications business (my first job was as telecom broker back in 2002) i wanted to share with you a few thoughts.
"Neutrality" 🤔
Can we actually use the word NEUTRALITY in an age where GAFA (Google Apple Facebook Amazon) own around 80% of the internet traffic, where they use algorithms that are completely secretive and almost impossible to challenge. They can literally design algorithms that could influence the way we think, by lowering the power of some ideas and boosting some others, using AI. They have total control over our collective consciousness and we're freaking out about operators potentially charging a few bucks for data?
Phone data plans
Did you know? Your phone data plans are not under any form of net neutrality, which means the prices are free and based on competition. Because yes, if your carrier started to increase the price for no reason, there would be a newcomer taking over the market the same way it happened in France with the operator Free. The guy went on TV, called all carriers scammers, and got all the customers of the market in a couple of months just by offering extremely low prices and saving on advertising budgets. The free market always drives the prices to the lowest, because of competition. And with cell phone carriers, that's what we saw. Same for home internet connections, they always try to give the biggest internet speed for the lowest price.
"Net Neutrality" 🤔
In fact, the name of the bill was NET NEUTRALITY but the actual text and how it operated, was more about having governments gaining the power to access and analyse the way data was being dispatched within operators networks, which means, again, increasing the amount of data collected about us. Operators store for example all the phones passing through a certain wifi router or the URLs of the videos we're watching on youtube or where our bitcoin transactions were made. NET NEUTRALITY in the bill that was passed by Obama, is a term used to give governments the power to collect more data about us. Do you really like the government and intelligence contractors having their hands and eyes over your personal life, or political opinions? Personally, no thanks ! It's like the NSA mass surveillance program was called something related to our safety, and if you were opposing intrusion on your personal life, they would say "you're against safety". Well that's actually how this rhetorics works.
"The end of Internet as we know it." according to CNN and Bernie Sanders
The internet market was working without the bill that was voted by the FCC in 2015. Which means 20+ years of Internet without the need for regulation. We were doing just fine for 20+ years !!! then had two years of this regulation in place, and now it's repealed. Did operators charge more for the use of Myspace in 2003 or p0rnhub prior to 2015?
A battle between corporations
Do you really think bureaucrats, lawyers, state workers and politicians have the knowledge to deal with such complex questions? In order to apply the law, they will have to hire contractors which are usually big corporations working for them on processing huge amounts of data about how internet operators trade their network and dispatch the traffic of data. These contractors will have to be paid with tax money, and of course, with the mechanisms of revolving doors, will work for a while at the state admin in charge of it, then for the contractor and so on, until it becomes almost impossible to differentiate public from private workers and which interests they actually defend. At the end, it will be like for all other industries regulators put their hands on: some corporations will pay to have the laws designed in order to give them a competitive advantage. It's the same old song of public power being traded to private entities.
Conclusion
Of course, if operators have the power to control what can be done on their network, itsounds scary, but in fact, for commercial reasons, they would never abuse this power because they could lose a percentage of their customers which would mean millions if not billions of dollars. GAFA companies can afford to do it because it's untraceable, but when it comes to the operators, it would be very easy to test how some websites take longer to load or if they started to censor some Youtube videos or Netflix movies. When it comes to price, the price of data will keep decreasing everywhere because that's why ISP invest so much in building ever stronger and faster networks. Anyone who would start to increase prices would go against the direction everyone has been taking since the inception of the internet. It's much cheaper to keep your customers than trying to attract new ones, so it's mathematically impossible operators would abuse this power. When it comes to public officials, it's not their money neither their companies, so they wouldn't mind creating an unfair context that would profit some corporations.
I'm now glad to announce you, we just got our free internet back.
