RCN is messing with internet access and our right to net neutrality

[This post is for Greg Scott, who caught me in the middle of a rant about RCN over at Twitter.]

For about 4 months now I have noticed the change in service : I will get to YouTube but the pages load as slow as molasses. Other times, if I'm doing a search in Google, the page will take forever to load.

Today though, it's pretty obvious what's happening : I can't get into Google from my home connection. No Google. No Gmail. No YouTube. So I pinged people on Twitter and asked if anybody was having problems getting into Google.

Erica G replied from Boston :

I'm on RCN in Boston and having trouble connecting to Yahoo and tinyurl this evening. # [...] And actually, thinking of it, for the past several weeks I haven't been able to load YouTube videos properly, either. #

Melanie Notkin, who is also in NYC, reported the same issue. Maria Niles is on Comcast California, but she has had similar choppy access to YouTube in the past several weeks, making her wonder if she's living in China.

Why is this so important to blog and not dismiss as a possible "blip" or outage? Well, if we take into consideration all the services Google provides, the search company may indeed be the largest and most trafficked network of websites in the world. YouTube alone would make Google the largest video broadcaster at least in the United States.

Are you going to tell me RCN just happened to degrade service to the biggest web network and web services provider in the United States? As Seinfeld would say ... I. Don't. Think. So.

Companies like RCN and Comcast want to compete with Google especially in the music and video streaming business. As cable companies, they'd call that business synergy. So they'll invoke "consumer satisfaction" and "traffic management" as the reason to degrade service to YouTube or Google.

Yes, you read that right. They believe that in order to provide better quality service they have to degrade service to most internet users in order to provide better service to only those who are willing to pay extra (as in a premium) for the better tier of services.

So, let me repeat that : RCN believes degrading the quality of access is the way to better service.

They've claimed the FCC needs to allow them to discriminate access to the internet and use of web services if their "tubes" are not to collapse under the weight of high bandwidth ... ahem ... video streaming web services like Youtube or media heavy pages like Flickr or Odeo.

Which is why they are against what internet activists call "net neutrality".

Net neutrality is basically an internet access issue. Information (or, in net-geek-speak, "data packets") are supposed to move freely between all servers on the internet. The internet to be truly efficient needs to be technologically agnostic (meaning not beholden to one technological implementation) and it also needs to allow data packets to move freely for all activity online to move freely --including, of course, all human activity as well.

It is for this reason internet providers have been treated up until now as private utilities. They've been supposed to provide the system of connections --the digital highways-- over which all this data packet traffic is happening.

Yet companies like RCN want to be seen now as internet portals that act as referrers of traffic to other sites on the internet. By doing so, the anti-neutrality logic goes, internet providers will be able to make money out of "referring" traffic to any and all places on the internet and provide "better service".

Meaning, to those who want free access to and fro any point of the internet through their servers, they will charge a premium and provide a grade A tier. Everybody else? wait in line to get online on whatever tier you can afford to pay.

RCN could very well be degrading my access to Google and Angie's access to Yahoo in order to force the two biggest internet portals to pay them for the privilege of their traffic or negotiate some monetization agreement. Far fetched?

If we look closely at the alleged "net neutrality agreement" between Comcast and Bittorrent, one can see it's a monetization scheme that will free Bittorrent from Comcast's throttling of net traffic. In other words, the Bittorrent deal puts emphasis on the "application agnostic" part of net neutrality by cracking the whip of traffic management on (or plunging the knife on the back or triggering the shot in the heart of ) users.

We the customers of any internet company already pay huge tolls for the benefit of using the internet, a communications system that was not only not developed by RCN or Comcast. We pay way too much for access to a technology that was developed for government use with our taxes. What the greedy bastards are trying to do is to extort companies like Google for the privilege of allowing their customers not just reach their sites, but actually be able to use them. And since they already have an example of how they will be able to create new business partnerships, it clears the way for them to indiscriminately make money from users with zero accountability for service.

This is not why the internet was created.

The internet was founded on the concept of access for all no matter from where, no matter through what, and no matter for what. The concept of net neutrality has at its core access to internet services at any time, to any place and with no restrictions or strings attached because users and service developers have in principal equal rights to be online.

In other words, net neutrality is not just about the traffic management imperative of corporations. It has at its core the very idea of being a sort of "penumbra" that implicitly protects every individual's civil rights in the digital realm.

The problem? Our right to assembly, to freedom of expression or to freedom of the press in the online world have never been clarified in a court of law nor written into law.

This is why net neutrality is not a technology matter of "data packets" or a trade issue involving money making schemes with traffic or music downloads. Net neutrality is part of the legal considerations that we need to have in place for our constitutional rights to be protected and recognized in the non physical, non geographic digital world of the internet.

So next time you can't get into your favorite website, don't consider it just a blip. That "outage" may well be the telecoms' and cable companies' preemptive strike in the war against your constitutional right to equality online.