What is Net Neutrality?

Is one website more important than another on the worldwide web? Every user has his favourite sites – internet service providers (ISPs) currently operate on the principle of ‘Net Neutrality’, which guarantees that all online sites are treated equally and can be accessed at similar speed, regardless of content or content provider. 

Is one website more important than another on the worldwide web? Every user has his favourite sites – internet service providers (ISPs) currently operate on the principle of ‘Net Neutrality’, which guarantees that all online sites are treated equally and can be accessed at similar speed, regardless of content or content provider. 

Essentially, it means that if you created an online blog about cats for example, and published it online today, anyone who wanted to access the site could access it at the same internet speed as the likes of Google or Yahoo or even EconomyWatch.

Net neutrality ensures that every website runs on a level playing field, however there are some people, more specifically the ISPs, who believe we should dedicate more internet bandwidth to more significant and ‘important’ websites. 

The most common argument against net neutrality is when you visit a ‘less important’ site, you consume internet bandwidth and cause slower internet access for other users who share the same ISP:

Imagine you’re in the office and you’re trying to access economywatch.com for economic data. At the same time however, your colleagues are on YouTube watching funny viral videos. Because your office shares the same ISP, your access to economywatch may be slower than usual. If the ISPs could determine that economywatch was far more ‘important’ than YouTube, you would be able to access it faster.

The big issue though is how ISPs determine the “importance” of any website. ISPs are proposing to create a faster but more expensive internet service that guarantees you better access to the ‘important’ sites – decided by whether the content provider pays the ISP to be ranked higher. This may result in more paid content online as content providers are saddled with costs that they may pass down to their audience. This also goes against the basic founding principles of the internet where information can be shared freely among every internet user.

If net neutrality ceased to exist, it would be harder for startup internet companies to compete against the established internet giants. Companies like Google for example may not enjoy the success it has today if the other established search engines at that time such as Yahoo or Lycos were considered more “important” and thus could provide faster searches. Net neutrality also ensures that internet users are free to decide for themselves the content they want to access and where they wish to access the content from.

The following infographic will provide some background into the debate:

Source: Online MBA 

 

Raymond Tham

EconomyWatch.com