The Washington Post recently published an interview with billionaire technology entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. In the interview, Cuban rails against President Obama’s endorsement of “net neutrality,” saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it… there is no better platform in the world to start a new business than the Internet in the United States.”
Unfortunately, Cuban seems to have gotten his ideas about the Internet’s status quo confused. The Internet isn’t broken—and it’s precisely because of net neutrality that it is that way. Net neutrality simply means keeping the Internet the way it is right now—open and fair, with every piece of content delivered to users at the same speed as everything else.
There are very few open playing fields left in American life. We are a country plagued by inequalities. The Internet, and the scrappy dorm-room success stories that emerged from it, have exemplified meritocracy at its best. Sure, it never hurts to have gobs of money and powerful friends, but the most important element for startup success is a good idea and a doggone willingness to execute it—and a neutral net rightfully keeps the latter from being overshadowed by the former.
Without net neutrality, it seems likely like the best services will be buried by the power of corporate interest. Take, for example, Netflix’s streaming service—something considered by many Georgetown students to be an essential component of a college experience. Without net neutrality laws, if Comcast had a problem with Netflix—say, they invested in a rival video-on-demand website, or are unhappy that customers’ binge-watching habits eat up a lot of bandwidth—they can say, “screw you, Netflix; pay us more money or we’ll cut the speed at which we stream your videos.”
This isn’t a fantasy. It happened last winter. Netflix made it clear in public statements that it opposed Comcast’s $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable, with CEO Reed Hastings saying that the merged companies “would have control over high-speed residential Internet in a majority of American homes… that is clearly not ‘great’ for consumers.” Comcast’s response was to slow Netflix streaming speeds on its network to a crawl, causing customers to abandon the service in droves—until Netflix acquiesced to Comcast’s demand for an extortionate payment.
Tiered systems of content delivery, as we’ve seen them executed thus far are good for one thing—the pocketbooks of telecommunications companies. They do no good for anyone else, be it big companies like Facebook or Netflix that will face steep fees to provide high-speed “fast lanes” for their services, or small startups that risk being ignored by consumers if they are relegated to permanently sluggish connections.
Opposition to net neutrality seems to stem, largely, from critiques of government intervention in the Internet, a private system.
I love the Internet the way it is now. It’s a wellspring of knowledge, one of the most important things in my life, and one of the few entities that gives me hope for the future of the planet. When I hear anti-net neutrality statements from people like Cuban – or from potential presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who tweeted the pure falsity that net neutrality is “Obamacare for the Internet”—it makes me well up inside with sadness. If we didn’t have net neutrality over the past 15 years, it’s likely that the Internet would have become a very different, pretty miserable place.
My favorite website, Wikipedia, is a non-profit that barely manages to cover its operating expenses through NPR-style pledge drives. It started out modestly, and it continues to exist in much the same way. Would Wikipedia have gained any traction in a market that demands payments to various Internet service providers just to ensure a satisfactory connection speed? I see no reason to believe that the same level of innovation that built the wonderful network of grass-root sites that don’t have a clear means to build profit—like Wikipedia or Reddit—could exist in a world that hands out the fastest connection speeds to the highest bidder. I don’t agree with President Obama on very much, but this October when he called on the FCC to implement strict net neutrality rules because “the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life,” I was proud to see him take a stand on an issue that threatens to rip apart one of the most precious resources humanity has cultivated.
