Just like highways, the Internet experiences heavy traffic. Up until now, the one thing that differentiated regular highways and the Internet was that no matter how much traffic there was, the Internet never required anyone to pay tolls in order to avoid major streams of traffic. However, recent undercurrents of activity by certain players in the telecom industry could eliminate this difference by essentially making Internet tolls a reality.
Verizon Communications has become a central player in this issue, filing documents with the Federal Communications Commission that conveyed their intentions of setting apart more than 80% of its current fiber-optic network capacity for its own television service. The remaining portion of its capacity would be left for all other traffic.
John Thorne, a senior vice president and deputy general counsel at Verizon, has pointed to Google as a catalyst to this push, claiming that Google is a freeloader for using Verizon’s billion-dollar network of lines and cables to obtain access to homes.
“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers. It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers,” Thorne said at a conference on February 6th. “The only way we are going to attract the truly huge amounts of capital needed to build out these networks is to strike down governmental entry barriers and allow providers to realize profits,” he added.
As expected, Verizon’s plans have caused an odious response from Internet companies. Their consumers would all have to squeeze into the remaining capacity on Verizon’s networks, squeezing “out the public Internet in favor of services or content they want to provide,” said Paul Misener, vice-president for global policy at Amazon.com.
Vinton G. Cerf, a vice president at Google and one of the key scientists who helped bring the Internet to life, says that moves by telecom companies such as the ones Verizon looks to make “would do great damage to the Internet as we know it.”
Verizon claims that it must take such measures in order to actually earn a return on its network investments. Its foray into the high-quality television market requires Verizon to devote much of its bandwidth to the service, and with a $10 billion investment over seven years on brand new fiber-optic lines across the nation, Verizon asserts that they cannot compete with the likes of Comcast unless they charge extra for access to Internet “express” lanes.
Chief executive at AT&T, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., also supports this push for Internet tolls, contending that Google, Yahoo!, and other similar Internet services should have to pay fees to gain access to preferred lines to reach their consumers. In a November interview with BusinessWeek, Whitacre said that video and phone applications require more of the company’s Internet plumbing, and that for “anybody to expect to use these pipes (for) free is nuts!”
Regardless, Internet companies are pushing Congress to pass a law that would make sure that broadband providers would not discriminate against rivals when they charge these tolls or prioritize Internet traffic, and for regulation on when and how network providers can charge premiums for access to faster Internet delivery.
This deals directly with the issue of “network neutrality,” which is the concept that all traffic on the Internet should be allowed to flow equally, without preference regarding network providers. Those who are pushing for this neutrality include consumer advocates along with Net giants such as Google and Microsoft.
Cerf stated that “In the Internet world, both ends essentially pay for access to the Internet system, and so the providers of access get compensated by the users at each end. My big concern is that suddenly access providers want to step in the middle and create a toll road to limit customers’ ability to get access to services of their choice even though they have paid for access to the network in the first place.”
Is network neutrality legislation necessary? Should network providers be able to charge tolls for access to wider lanes with less traffic? The Senate and House will debate these issues as phone companies utilize their huge masses of lobbyists and large donations to get their message across.
Sources:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2006/tc20060202_061809.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/06/AR2006020601624.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/07/BUG5IH3OLR1.DTL
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