The U.S. is considering legally preventing ISPs from restricting or delaying their subscribers’ access to specific sites.
Protecting this principle, known by the catch-all phrase net neutrality, is important because it is the most basic assumption we make online: that we can access any website, play any media, download any file, limited only by the bandwidth/download cap in our tariff plan.
In the absence of protection, ISPs – both cable and phone companies (in the US and in India) could create a ‘tiered Intenet’:
They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. And they want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking services offered by their competitors.
Imagine (this is ONLY hypothetical) that your ISP – say Sify in India – enters into a partnership with Microsoft. Under the terms of the agreement, Sify will give requests made to the search engine Bing twice as much bandwidth as to other search engines like Google (say, in return for a small percentage of ad revenues from the search).
Or say (once again, hypothetically) Airtel Broadband starts an online radio service, and manipulates network management to reserve more bandwidth for that service as opposed other (maybe a competitor’s) online radio or music streaming service.
Or that you could make VoIP calls only from your ISP’s ‘approved’ software (which may or may not be freely available).
Or that if your ISP notices that you download too many movies and music, your access to those websites could be ‘slowed down’ (blocking access is a strict no-no, so this could be a very convenient workaround for the ISP).
Finally, this sort of forced neutrality, of course, could interfere with ISPs’ network management and compel them to allocate more bandwidth than they have available:
In such a scenario, wireless carriers may have to rethink how much they charge for data plans or even cap how much bandwidth individuals get, said Julie Ask, a wireless analyst at Jupiter Research.
It’s a debate we aren’t having in India yet – and we should. We’re a resource-hungry but bandwidth-starved nation; our demand for smoother YouTube videos and faster (illegal) music/movie downloads creates strong incentives for our ISPs to resort to network manipulation.