Do the terms of the US net neutrality debate have relevance to low-bandwidth countries?

Posted on July 14, 2008 / 2 Comments

Net neutrality has become the hot-button issue in US telecom policy. Barack Obama is for net neutrality and the Republican-dominated FCC is leaning in that direction as can be seen below.

However, is this something we need to import? If everyone is charged the same irrespective of use, what really happens is that the low-users end up subsidizing the high-users, especially in countries of the South, where the biggest cost driver is international bandwidth. What we need is a business model wherein low users pay only for what they use, in small amounts. This is what worked in mobile, and this is what will work in broadband.

So let’s take the essence of the net neutrality debate, that no class of user should be excluded. Let’s not take the elements which argue that it’s wrong to charge for use/volume.

F.C.C. Chief Backs Sanctions Against Comcast Over Blocking – NYTimes.com

Mr. Martin’s recommendation is a strong push for network neutrality, the idea that Internet access providers like Comcast should not be allowed to favor some uses of their networks over others. Internet companies like Google and free speech advocates have backed this approach.

The cable and phone companies that provide most of the nation’s Internet service have argued that such rules were not needed. They have said that they should be free to run their networks as they see fit, and that there had been no cases of problems with such discrimination.

2 Comments

Parminder Jeet Singh
August 10, 2010, 3:33 pm
Rohan

Net neutrality has nothing to do with how telecoms charge users for their broadband usage – flat, slabbed or whatever. It only has to do with whether telecoms are allowed to charge content providers for preferential treatment of their content on the network. So, whatever be one’s views on the latter, it is best not to muddle the already difficult issue by conflating two completely different things.
Parminder, IT for Change, Bangalore
PravNJ
December 25, 2010, 10:12 am
I agree with Parminder. This article is highly confusing.

The stifling of net neutrality has to do with ISPs giving preferential treatment to their services and to services that have come to some kind of agreement with said ISP. For example yahoo may create some sort of agreement with ISP-X so that subscribers of ISP-X would be forced to use yahoo as their default search provider. This could be enforced either by blocking other search providers or by choking access to other service providers to the point where the user just gives up i.e has an “instinctive” to switch to (say) yahoo which operates as per usual.

Expecting more on net neutrality and its implications for this region. It is sad to note that I have not seen any analysis on the current situation in the US and its relationship to users in our region.

I just want a few questions answered and hope that you guys will get on this issue ASAP before it becomes too late and this new “paradigm” for charging customers based on the type of service as opposed to the bit-rate (regardless of what we consume, data, voice, video) or bandwidth or capacity (per Mb etc) which makes MUCH more sense from the point of view of a consumer.

I hope that this image would clear things up http://i.imgur.com/5RrWm.png

“What we need is a business model wherein low users pay only for what they use, in small amounts. This is what worked in mobile, and this is what will work in broadband.

Heres the deal if this becomes the dominant paradigm the majority of ADSL users will suffer. Why not just incentivize ISPs to provide as many options as possible. ADSL users can have their cake and eat it while “the low users” as you put it can buy cheap limited packages?

Its just a disturbing thought that one may have to pay different rates for different services in the future.