The Movement Toward a Neutral Web

It is another case of the little guy against the Man, the innovators against the establishment, the many against the few. In this round, we have the Internet service providers (ISPs) facing off against Internet users in the battle for net neutrality.

Essentially, the ISPs believe they should be able to strike deals to give certain websites priority in reaching consumers. Consequently, smaller websites would be more difficult to access, and creating an Internet giant like Google from scratch would border on impossible.

This is the exactly what organizations like Free Press and savetheinternet.com are trying to prevent.

“[Net neutrality] is important because it is the way the Internet has always operated,” says Jen Howard, Associate Communications Director for Free Press, a media reform organization based out of Northampton, Ma. “It is what has allowed to the Internet to become the wonderful democratic innovation that it is.

“There is not a gatekeeper who determines what gets seen, heard, or watched on YouTube. It has allowed start-ups—like Google was ten years ago— to develop into something like Google now. Start-ups have a chance to pass or fail based on merits, not some kind of agreement with AT&T.”

Savetheinternet.com is a coalition of net neutrality supporters formed in April 2006. It is comprised primarily of non-profit organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Free Press, and the Christian Coalition of America, and small businesses, educators, bloggers, and some small ISPs, like midPhase Services, Inc. and SingleHop, Inc.

These groups are not the only ones interested in protecting the Internet, however.

“Popular online content providers like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and others would like to maintain the current status quo, which they claim would preserve the egalitarian philosophy on which the Internet was founded,” said Hsing Kenneth Cheng, a professor at University of Florida. “Other supporters of the concept include online start-ups, who claim that it would be almost impossible for them to pay these proposed fees when their revenue streams are almost non-existent, since they have to give away most of their content for free in order to build a loyal customer base.

“Some venture capitalists have even argued that abandoning net neutrality would result in would-be entrepreneurs becoming more hesitant to start a business, a state of affairs that might even hurt the competitiveness of the American online firms in the long run.”

To prevent this, the ideal goal of the movement is for Congress to enact legislation to permanently protect net neutrality.

In June 2006, the House of Representatives passed the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006,” also known as the COPE Act. The primary premise of this bill was to allow telephone companies to begin offering television services to Americans by creating a national franchise that would set a single standard for television.

The initial COPE Act also contained a provision that would make it impossible to protect net neutrality. However, this eventually was defeated.

Later in June, legislation came up before the Senate to re-haul the Telecom Act, referring to the bill as the “Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunities Reform Act.” While the bill did not hurt net neutrality, it did not explicitly protect it, either. Movement leaders felt its inclusion was crucial to the movement.