Net neutrality isn’t a principle, it’s a tautology. A neutrally carried internet is, well, the internet. Anything else is something else.
Over the history of computing, short as it is, there’ve been many visions of how information would be distributed among the communities, offices or homes that might contain a computer. Who exactly would own these computers and connections was not yet a pressing question. In the 1940s, when computing really began, distinctions between the state and business were at their most blurred. Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, would warn with good reason against the rise of the military-industrial complex.
But big ideas need big money, so in the aftermath of World War II anyone who was interested in the new field of electronics gravitated towards defence funding. After the defeat of Nazism and before Vietnam, even somewhat left-leaning, free-thinking characters had few qualms about Uncle Sam’s dime, and after all, the work strayed very far from the business of killing. By the 1960s, a thriving, highly integrated (though sometimes internecine) community spanning the sciences, big business and the military was hard at work on all kinds of modern problems; it would spawn Xerox PARC, for example, whose research would find its most influential expression in the Apple Macintosh.
And as it turned out, idealists and defence wonks had a goal in common: both saw that the best network would be one that had no centrally controlled structure and therefore could not be centrally annexed, sabotaged or disabled.
What nobody quite appreciated was just how powerfully the same principle would expand its commercial potential. In the 1980s, numerous attempts were made to commercialise closed networks. In the US, CompuServe offered dial-up access by the hour to files and email, and tried to develop entertainment services. In France, the state funded Minitel, a text-based online service, accessed from terminals issued free of charge, offering directories, message boards, databases, mail order buying and, mon dieu, porn. Thousands of bulletin board systems (BBSes), funded by metered access, rolled their own.
These networks caught on, but they didn’t take off. The number of users willing to pay the money and jump through the hoops was always limited; even more so the number of content providers with the funds and nous to set up shop, if they could decide which service to set up shop on. Everything was bottlenecks. Then, as services standardised on Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn’s TCP/IP, and Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web protocols allowed all clients to view the same content, it became possible for all content providers to target all users, without anyone needing closed, metered access providers to get in the way.
When British ISP Demon Internet first offered ‘tenner a month’ unlimited dial-up, in 1992, it seemed commercial suicide. How would ISPs make any money if they charged a flat fee and let users go wherever they wanted? The model had always been walled gardens, pay by the hour. But it turned out that people preferred to pay less and see everything. Why wouldn’t they? So the money followed them.
When you remember that’s how we got here, it’s blindingly obvious that allowing ISPs to block content they don’t want to deliver, or make content work better if its provider pays extra, or base business models on selling content instead of access, is going backwards. It’s putting the internet away and returning to the complicated, expensive, limited mish-mash we had before, where only the big players can play and consumers have a choice of dross. As Obama has pointed out, that’s not how you foster innovation. That’s how you prevent innovation.
35 years ago, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built their first computer for next to nothing, and sold it themselves, because HP and Atari weren’t interested. Political and social concerns aside, perhaps the best and simplest argument for net neutrality, and one that any Conservative should grasp, is that it’s all about just anyone being able to just do it.
Adam Banks
