Perhaps I've written about this before - someone asked me what I thought about net neutrality and my response turned into a bit of a rant. I thought I'd open it up...

I mostly avoid paying too much attention to the net neutrality debate. Net Neutrality is a negotiation between large Internet content hosts (primarily Google) and large ISPs (like AT&T and Verizon). There are legitimate questions about the architecture of the Internet, which has attracted law professors like Tim Wu and Larry Lessig. There are also, frankly, legitimate concerns about over regulation of the Internet. However, there are much more important issues and this one gets way more attention than it deserves.

Back in the 1980's long distance telecom was expensive, even if all you were doing was sending an email, so most information access involved online services like Compuserve and AOL. In the online service model your service provider hosts most of the services you want to access, such as email, discussion forums, online shopping, etc in a location that is physically close to the place you dialed into, instead of far away on the Internet, because far away services were expensive and didn't work as well. As telecom became more efficient, online services were mostly supplanted by the Internet, because it gave consumers more choices in terms of what services they accessed. Now a days often all you get from your internet service provider is network access, and your email, discussion forums, and other services are hosted by other companies in other physical locations, such as by Google. When you use the Internet, its hard to tell how far away a server is - they all seem to work well no matter how far away they are. (*)

However, the internet is not perfect, there are still high bandwidth services like streaming high resolution video that are expensive and unreliable over long distances. Google wants to make it illegal for ISPs to provide those services locally in an online service type model, because those local services would be difficult for Google to compete with from a remote location on the network. Thats the issue in a nutshell.

Google has spent a tremendous amount of money trying to convince people that this is a grass roots political issue which is a fundamental matter of Internet freedom. That spending has been very effective - I constantly run into people who don't follow Internet issues very closely who are concerned or angry about net neutrality, and of course they form their own center of gravity, attracting others to the cause with their genuine concern. This is the only Internet freedom issue that gets regular support from professional politicians - Al Franken, for example, talks about it because they are donating money to his campaign, and not because he really understands internet issues.

There are two reasons why this issue is overwrought and phony:

1. A real net neutrality discussion which would have real relevance to the grass roots who are often spun up about this would not be about the parity of Google and AT&T, but about the parity of Google and individual internet users. Can YOU host services on the Internet as easily as Google can? Can you set up a web server in your house? Can you get a static IP from your provider? Does it cost extra? Do their terms of service allow you to host services on your connection? Can you send a receive email using your own mail server?

These are important questions regarding the architectural "neutrality" of the internet and its ability to support innovative new services, but you never see them discussed in this context. You don't see Tim Wu or Larry Lessig writing law review articles about network neutrality for individual internet users. Some animals are more neutral than others.

2. There are a number of internet issues with real relevance to individual people which should be getting more grass roots attention than this one. Warrantless wiretapping of the internet. Random, suspicionless search and seizure of laptops and cellphones at US border crossings. Various western countries who have adopted centralized internet censorship systems. The ridiculous notion that our current copyright terms are constitutionally "limited." The list goes on and on.

To me its truly disheartening when I talk to people on the periphery of Internet issues and the first thing that comes to mind for them is net neutrality - If you care about net neutrality you are relatively well informed and probably well educated, but marketing dollars are still deciding for you what you should think about. If people's interests are chosen for them, then they are not in control. If the sort of people who care about net neutrality are not in control of what they think, no one is.

(*)This is true at least in the West. In Asian archipelagos long distance internet is still expensive and people don't have the same expectation that distance is irrelevant. Also - I'm oversimplifying a lot of technical details like global server load balancing.