Manufacturing Wealth - Net Neutrality
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE AS AN INDIVIDUAL AND AS A BUSINESS OWNER
By: Dave Edstrom
Besides President Johnson’s “The Great Society” and President Kennedy’s Apollo program, what stands out as the program that truly helped all Americans? I would argue that the Internet and the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System would be #1 and #2. While the government has managed not to mess up our highway system, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) might be doing significant damage to the Internet, depending on what they decide to do with net neutrality. Anyone who tells you net neutrality is not a big deal is demonstrating their complete lack of knowledge of economics and technology. Let’s dig into net neutrality and learn why it is important for not only manufacturing, but for every industry and any person who uses the Internet.
Let’s start with the basics; what is net neutrality? Before we even get into net neutrality, it is important to have a brief primer on how the Internet works. Think of life before packets, which I will explain in a few moments, as a point-to-point type of conversation that is much like what your grandmother or great grandmother would do back in the 1930s when she called her sister. Your grandmother would call the local operator, who was sitting in front of a big switchboard, and tell the operator she wanted to talk to her sister. The operator would physically connect her jack to her sister’s jack using a cord. They had a point-to-point connection. You can imagine how inefficient that would be in terms of scaling. It was once calculated that if every person in the United States had a phone, then every person in the United States would also have to be a phone operator because of the number of possible connections. Clearly, that did not scale. Along came mechanical switchboards and the ability to dial your own phone without having to use an operator. This was a big step for communication. Computers could speak to each other over phone lines, but there was an impending security problem with this scenario.
In the late 1950s, it was obvious to those in the military and in the computer industry that computers were going to be very important for our national security. I was born in the Eisenhower administration and remember the drills of getting under the desk in case of a nuclear attack. Luckily for the United States, we had very smart scientists both in government and in industry. While the Internet had many fathers, I am going to highlight just one who did seminal work on packet switching, which is fundamental for our discussion on net neutrality. The best article I could find on this topic is from Wired Magazine, published September 4th, 2012 and is titled, “Paul Baran, the link between nuclear war and the internet.” Cade Metz states in the opening paragraphs:
“Paul Baran set out to build a means of communication that could survive a nuclear war. And he ended up inventing the fundamental networking techniques that underpin the Internet.
In the early 1960s -- as an engineer with the RAND Corporation, the US armed-forces think tank founded in the wake of the Second World War -- Baran developed a new breed of communication system that could keep running even if part of it was knocked out by a nuclear blast. It was the height of the Cold War, and the nuclear threat was very much on the mind of, well, just about everyone.
Basically, Baran cooked up a system that could divide communications into tiny pieces and use distributed network "nodes" to pass these pieces around. If one node was knocked out, the others could pick up the slack. In 1964, he published a paper on this system -- entitled "On Distributed Communications" -- and a few years later, it would play into the development of the ARPAnet, the research network that would eventually morph into the modern internet.”
This is how packets on the Internet work. Imagine you write a long email to a friend. Packet-switching divides your long email into smaller packets that are the size of a 3x5 card. Let’s say that your email is divided into 20 3x5 cards. When those 20 cards get sent out over the Internet, a few might go north, some might go south, but they all eventually reach their destination. When they reach their destination, those cards all get reassembled into the text you originally wrote. You don’t know what path each little 3x5 card took and you don’t care. All you care about is that your email gets there in one piece. There could be many, many stops along the way. The movement of Internet packets is similar to the way you take a different road to avoid traffic. At any given point in time, there are an unfathomably high number of packets moving between various systems, carrying everything from that long email to your friend, to Netflix movies, to new apps for your iPad, to encrypted communications, to Amazon.com where people are buying goods, and everything in between.
Now, to finally answer the question, “what is net neutrality?” Net neutrality basically means that a packet is a packet with no distinction on where the packet came from, where the packet is going or the contents of the packet. Why is net neutrality a good thing? Let’s look at the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the goal was to provide a highway system that was not just a hodge-podge of state roads, but a truly interconnected system. There is no one who would argue that this did not change American society and American culture in tremendous and positive ways.
If a family wants to leave from Ashburn, Va., and make a trip to visit their son in San Francisco, they can take the highway system and never have to pay a toll to get to their destination. Yes, there are toll roads, but you are not forced to take them. When you are taking the family truckster and driving across the United States, there are no signs along the way that state in big bold letters, “If you are coming from Ashburn, Va., and going to SuperDuperFun Land in San Francisco, please use the unlimited speed lane – all others are not allowed in that lane under any circumstances – even if the unlimited speed lanes are empty.”
Let’s look at a hypothetical business example of net neutrality, or rather the lack of net neutrality. Peter Eelman, VP - Exhibitions & Communications at AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology, and the person in charge of IMTS, gets swamped with a number of emails and phone calls from the Midwest complaining about the speed of getting data from the IMTS website. Peter investigates and finds that there are no problems with the website. Upon further investigation, Peter learns that the largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the Midwest, Billy Bob’s Midwest ISP, has relegated all IMTS website traffic to the slow lane. This means that all of the packets can’t take the fast lane anymore. Peter asks the president of Billy Bob’s Midwest ISP, “What can I do? My customers are complaining.” The president tells Peter, “You’re in luck; we have a special package where, for just $10,000 a month, we can put every IMTS packet onto the super-fast lane so your customers will not have to wait to get their IMTS information.” Peter then says, “So, if I do not pay you $120,000 a year, then ALL of my IMTS traffic gets slowed down, correct?” The president then says, “Peter, no, no not all. We never slow down traffic. What we have is a super-fast lane for those companies who need it and are willing to pay for it.” Peter then says, “If you put in a ‘fast lane’ then you are effectively slowing down traffic compared to how the Internet used to work, which is a packet is a packet is a packet.”
Hopefully, this brief article on net neutrality sheds some light on why this is so important for the future of the Internet, individuals and small businesses. If it is true, according to ALL of our politicians, that small business is the engine of our economy, then why are we stepping on the throats of startups by allowing some packets to be more important than other packets? Just remember, a packet should be a packet should be a packet – no matter where it came from, where it’s going and no matter what is inside of it. We should treat packets on the Internet like votes in a democracy – my vote or packet is no more or no less important than your vote or your packet. What can you do about this if you are concerned? Write a letter, don’t email, to your congressman or senator.
For questions or comments, Dave Edstrom can be found at Virtual Photons Electrons.
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