Guest column: Reinstate open-internet rules, innovation depends on it

By Gary C. Kessler

In September of this year, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced plans to re-instate open-internet rules - known as net neutrality - that were formally adopted by the Obama administration in 2015 and reversed by the Trump administration in 2017. What appears to be a boring regulatory debate is actually an important issue to all of us as internet users and consumers of internet services.

To understand the debate, it's important to define some terms and review some history. First, there are two levels to the internet: infrastructure and services. We physically access the internet via a hardware infrastructure composed of computers, communications channels, routers, and switches. We use the internet's infrastructure in order to access services - the software of the internet - such as social media, websites, e-mail, games, streaming services, search engines, etc.

Second, the FCC oversees internet service providers (ISPs), aka broadband internet access providers. These are the communication carriers that sell physical access to the internet, such as cable television and telephone companies. In other words, they are infrastructure and access providers rather than service providers.

The providers of internet services - not regulated by the FCC or, often, anyone else - are organizations such as Facebook, Google, X, Hotmail, and Netflix; every company, agency, and university that you have ever heard of; and tens of millions of sites that you have never heard of.

Net neutrality simply means that all sites on the internet are equally accessible to all users without interference or bias by the ISPs. Innovators can develop products and services without asking for permission, and ISPs are not allowed to block, impair, or establish fast/slow lanes to lawful content.

Read the above carefully and consider the following example. MySpace started in 2003 and was a huge success. Facebook became available to the public in 2006. Consumers - who had equal access to both platforms - largely decided that Facebook provided a better service than MySpace. Today, Facebook is the largest social networking site on the internet, with about 20% more registered users than the second most popular site (YouTube), and almost 500 times the number of users as MySpace. It doesn't matter whether you love or hate Facebook; this is an example of a free, neutral market where winners are decided by the consumers rather than external forces.

Now consider what might have happened in a non-open internet. MySpace, the dominant social media site in 2006, might well have had the resources to buy "express lane" service from ISPs whereas Facebook did not. Under that scenario, access speeds to Facebook would have been significantly slower than access speeds to MySpace, inhibiting consumer awareness of the competing service and/or their ability to make use of the capabilities of that service. In that scenario, money would have beat out a new and better idea, and the social media landscape might look very different today. (For that matter, what might Facebook do today to competitors if net neutrality is not ensured?)

We have allowed this issue to become political and conversations that fall on political boundaries rarely result in good policy. In this case, politics also ignores history. Opponents of a return to net neutrality today use two arguments. The first claim is that reversing the 2015 rule resulted in the U.S. having the best broadband internet access in the world. Whether that statement is correct or not is irrelevant; net neutrality has nothing to do with internet access and the ISPs have been deploying better internet access technologies for more than two decades.

The second claim is that the 2015 ruling was an unnecessary government overreach, solving a non-existent problem and stifling innovation. Nothing could be further from the truth and, in fact, flies in the face of the history of the internet. Since its inception as the ARPANET in 1969, and through commercialization in 1991, the internet was always open, as famously expressed by David Clark of MIT in 1992: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Innovation comes because someone in the user community develops an idea - or a way to improve an existing idea - and makes it available to the rest of the user community.

The open internet was a fertile test bed for then-nascent applications such as the web, search engines, streaming media, videoconferencing, and free international telephone calls. No one created applications in the non-open telephone network except the telephone company; on the internet, the user community, not the access providers, developed applications and services.

A formal mandate for net neutrality came about in 2015 only after ISPs had, years before, started to discuss charging for high-speed access to some services, for no other reason than increased profits. During the comment period prior to the 2015 ruling, the FCC received more than 4 million calls, massively in favor of maintaining net neutrality. Then-FCC Chair Tom Wheeler observed, "After a decade of debate, these rules finally provide strong safeguards for free expression."

In 2017, the FCC reversed the policy, under the political doublespeak of "Restoring Internet Freedom," despite overwhelming public comments asking for the rule to be left in place. The simple truth is that the current set of ISPs has never done anything to provide innovation in internet services - although they have clearly provided significant innovation in our methods of internet access.

I started using the ARPANET in 1981, five years before the "internet" and 10 years before the internet's commercialization. I have watched the 'net's technical evolution, as well as the evolution and development of new applications. Almost none of the players advocating for the rollback of net neutrality had anything to do with making the internet the greatest innovation incubator in the technical age. Net neutrality worked for the first 20 years of the internet as a research platform and the following quarter century as a commercial platform. Make no mistake: The ideal market decides winners and losers when all players have a level playing field; an open internet is the epitome of a fair game where good ideas - even from small players - can float to the top.

Gary C. Kessler, Ph.D., CISSP is a retired professor of cybersecurity at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. He is president of Gary Kessler Associates, providing training, education, and research services, primarily related to maritime cybersecurity.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Guest column: Free the internet, bring back network neutrality