Question

Write an informal paper that is exactly 3 pages long not counting the reference page or cover page. The paper should be on one of the following subjects:

Access to Cable, Broadcast TV, Broad-band Internet, and cellular service in your home county or country.

Impact of requiring Amazon to collect state sales taxes.

Access to Cable, Broadcast TV, Broad-band Internet, and cellular service in your home county or country 10 years ago.

What is net neutrality and how does it effect internet services

The papers must be single spaced with double spacing between paragraphs, one inch margins must be used top, bottom, and sides, a 12 point font must be used, all sources must be referenced, the paper must be in your own words no copying from the internet. You must work alone on this paper no group efforts will be accepted. No duplicate, partially duplicate, or near duplicate papers may be submitted.

Answer 1

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality, coined by Tim Wu, a professor of media law in Columbia University in 2003, is an egalitarian principle that the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will treat all content, applications and service equally, and not prioritize or degrade any in relation to others. It is not a technical principle nor is it about free market.

Internet’s initial architecture was built upon the principle that the carrier pipe will be completely dumb, with no capacity to discriminate among the bytes passing over it. All intelligence was at the periphery – in the end devices which collated the bytes into intelligible patterns. But for a long time now, considerable intelligence has been built into the network, by which it is able to discriminate between bytes for many purposes, especially traffic management, to ensure good internet experience to users. As long as such discriminations are not done for commercial consideration, whether to favor an ISP’s own offerings or that of their commercial partners is not considered a violation of net neutrality.

Why Net Neutrality is being favored?

• It ensures customers are not at the mercy of big organizations
• It spurs competition among ISPs
• It encourages the spread of ideas
• It helps prevent unfair pricing practices
• It stimulates entrepreneurship and hastens innovation
• It safeguards the freedom of speech

A lot of people like to present net neutrality as upholding the free market. Their position is that the market should be allowed to choose which internet content/application/service will succeed and which will not. It also gets defined as the right of a user (or consumer) to access and use any content, application or service of her choice. Real net neutrality is difficult to defend in the name of the free market and consumer choice alone. Much more than free choice, net neutrality is about equal opportunity. Just as the common school system is a way to ensure a certain equality of opportunity for all children, net neutrality can be understood basically as an attempt to provide equal opportunity to various social actors and activities that employ the internet for many different purposes. This certainly includes start-up internet companies, and since they certainly are not among the most oppressed classes of people, their case for equal opportunity is promoted in the name of ensuring innovation.

A much better basis for net neutrality than free market ideals is the “common carriage” principle which comes from the telecom regulation. It has precedence in many areas of transport, roads and bridges, and postal services. As per this principle, a carrier service represents a public utility, and has to be equally available to all possible “traffic” over it, in a non-discriminatory manner. Recently, the US regulator had to reclassify the internet as a telecommunication service from its earlier status of an information service, to be able to apply the common carriage principle to it.

Impact of net neutrality on internet services

Impact on Telecom Service Providers (TSPs)/Internet Service Provider (ISPs)–

Positive:

• Increase competition among ISPs
• Prevent unfair pricing practice

Negative:

• Loss of revenue
• Prevents investment into broadband infrastructure
• ISPs not motivated to increase capacity unless net revenue earned offsets the higher costs
• Economic loss to society

Impact on Traffic Management –

• Illegitimate traffic management techniques which can lead to discrimination by fixed and mobile TSPs/ISPs with market power in favor of their own applications, contents and services, thus harming both competition and consumers, will be prohibited
• Discrimination which may lead to degradation of quality of service will be prohibited
• No blocking of tethering services – Net neutrality will ensure consumer rights and provides it fair use limits for the data he has purchased.
• Improper prioritization may not be permitted

Impact on content providers –

• Smaller content providers who cannot afford to have such arrangements will not be discriminated against and will not impact their end user experience
• Content providers are serving all customers of the service provider uniformly and thus enhancing the user experience without any discrimination

Impact on Small and Medium Businesses –

• Absence of net neutrality enables ISPs to charge individuals and businesses according to their whims and fancies. These ISPs could charge exorbitant costs for higher speeds. For instance, according to USA Today, Netflix may have to incur an additional cost of $75 million to $100 million every year in content delivery for providing customers the same level of service that they expect from the company. SMBs that cannot afford such exorbitant costs would have to deal with a slower website, compared with their competitors, pushing them out of the market place ultimately.
• Level playing field: Net neutrality ensures a level-playing field for SMBs, which enables them to compete with bigger companies. Since both SMBs and big companies have same access to the internet, they are both able to leverage the business opportunities equally. Elimination of net neutrality would mean that SMBs would be rendered crippled and unable to compete with bigger companies.
• SMBs that depend on video (such as YouTube, Netflix, etc.) as part of their marketing strategy could be impacted if net neutrality is eliminated. For instance, if your company streams videos to homes across the country, or if you want customers to view your company’s product videos, then there’s a probability you might be affected. Similarly, if SMBs can’t afford to pay ISPs to share their content, their prospective customers may be unable to view the product videos and may not be enticed to purchase their products

Impact on Cloud Computing -

• No service blocking – SaaS (Storage as a Service) providers should not restrict or block access to computing and storage services
• No service throttling – Providers should not favor one customer over another
• No paid priority service – Providers should not selectively offer better services to selected customers at the expense of others