I really enjoy watching Glenn Beck. I think he’s dead on most of the time. However, on Net Neutrality, he’s jumping to the wrong conclusion. Watch the following video:
In the video above, Glenn and his guest are claiming that a core component of the Net Neutrality cause is to provide and subsidize a broadband connection to the Internet for every American. He’s getting this from a comment made by his favorite Marxist punching bag, Van Jones. While Van Jones did say that he is a proponent of the government providing a free broadband connection for every American, that is not what the general Net Neutrality movement is about.
The purpose of Net Neutrality is to “guard against discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, lawful content, applications, or services, by network operators based on their source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.” This is from the House Bill 3458, voted on in July 2009.
It does not say anywhere that the ISPs would be required to provide everyone with a broadband connection. However, one could argue that the term “Internet access” is too vague, which is why I choose to clarify the difference between providing a broadband connection to the Internet and providing access to the Internet.
Think of it this way. The Internet is like a network of highways, freeways, country lanes, and toll roads. On the Internet, most of the roads are toll roads. Opponents of Net Neutrality (e.g. AT&T, who own a lot of the super-sized toll roads) argue that they want to restrict what content/services are accessible by those who send or receive data over their toll roads. This is akin to the owner of a toll road (who is also a Yankees fan) saying that you cannot drive on his toll road if you are going to a Red Sox game. It is also akin to such a toll road owner (let’s say he’s an athiest) saying that you cannot drive on his toll road if you are a Christian. We all could come up with many more hypothetical examples of discrimination.
Of course, we would hope that AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and Verizon (the four big guys not in favor of Net Neutrality) would play nice and not block or degrade access to Christian web sites, Athiest web sites, Yankee web sites or Red Sox web sites, but it’s actually pretty easy to come up with plausible scenarios where they might want to do that.
Recently, Time Warner and ABC got into a spat over something, and ABC pulled their programming off of Time Warner’s cable network. I believe they’ve become friends again, but let’s say they have a falling out with NBC this time. Let’s assume NBC will again cover the Olympics in London. In addition to losing NBC content on their cable network, Time Warner might decide to block access to www.nbcolympics.com, preventing users from watching Michael Phelps win 31 gold medals. While the Olympics might be a yawn-inducing example, what if Time Warner decides to block foxnews.com or msnbc.com, or some other web site that you choose to get your news from? Still worse, what if they start blocking specific blogs or religious web sites simply because the executives at Time Warner don’t agree with the content (speech) on those sites? No, you may not drive on my toll road because you have a bumper sticker that says Jesus Saves on it.
This is sensitive area, though. While the House bill doesn’t grant the government the ability to regulate content access on the Internet, we as concerned Americans need to make sure that doesn’t sneak in there somewhere.
Now, on the other side of the issue, one of the arguments that these big companies make is about network reliability. They argue that they need the right to block certain services in order to keep the networks under their control from bogging down and failing. I agree with this. I believe that Comcast was totally in the right when it blocked the ports used by BitTorrent, because BitTorrent was degrading the overall “access” of all other services on their network. In the above analogy, the ability to block network-degrading traffic is similar to the toll road owner saying that trucks over a certain weight or width are prohibited from driving on the toll road because they would damage the road or pose a safety hazard to other drivers. Makes sense, right?
While the content of the House Bill is generally in line with the Net Neutrality cause, it is poorly written, in my opinion. Like I mentioned above, it does not sufficiently clarify the difference between providing Internet access and providing a broadband connection. To use the toll road analogy again, its akin to the difference between allowing anyone to use the toll road (as long as they pay, of course) and providing a private on-ramp to every person who might use the toll road. While the bill doesn’t specifically say that ISPs will have to provide a broadband connection to every American, it doesn’t clarify the opposite–plus, it includes this snippet at the end, which is very vague and ominous sounding: “…Internet access service provider shall have the duty to…provide Internet access service to any person upon reasonable request therefor;”. This does sound a little like what Glenn Beck is hearing from Van Jones, but I don’t think that was the intent. I believe the intent was to say that ISPs shouldn’t be able to deny people access if they can pay for the service. Why couldn’t they just say that?
In summary, the Net Neutrality movement isn’t about a government takeover of the Internet, even though some radicals (Van Jones) would like to piggy-back on the movement and try to get free broadband connections for everyone. So, I hope that Glenn Beck and other talking heads will take the time to draw the lines where they ought to be drawn and separate the basic ideas of Net Neutrality from the socialist, government expanding agendas of a few loud-mouths. But, I suppose that the most important thing isn’t whether Glenn Beck has his facts straight, it’s whether the legislature gets it right when it drafts the legislation and votes on it. That’s what we need to be watching and reading carefully.