With the recent vote in the Senate last Wednesday, May 16, 2018, a vote to save net neutrality rules, won 54-47. The vote will not necessarily impact the final decision of the House, but is reported to be a strategy to influence midterms later this year. It is expected that the vote will spark interest in younger generations to get out to the polls in midterms, as one of the main party topics projected to appeal to the demographic.
The vote to save net neutrality rules, established in 2015 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), once prevented broadband providers (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, to name a few) from throttling services, speeding up streams of content, or blocking targeted web traffic. Net neutrality calls for equal treatment for online traffic—an even playing field, effectively.
While the topic of net neutrality can loosely be translated into an issue about trust and the prediction of what might happen when large corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T have unrestrained power over the flow of data. What we do know is that it will have great impact on the Internet, small business, and consumer alike.
In the Wired article discussing the vote last Wednesday, contributor Susan Crawford makes a valid point about the vote’s potential force to keep the issue of internet freedom alive as we approach midterms later this year. She writes, “[e]veryone now understands that internet access is indispensable infrastructure for the 21st century economy.” She goes on to comment, “[f]or every American business to compete and every citizen to be part of the modern world, America needs cheap, reliable, and world-class connections to the internet everywhere—just as we need cheap, reliable and world-class electricity and water.”
The vote functions to make a point that most American opinions side to allow more internet freedom. Wired goes on to point out that the ones opposed to a freer internet are “the giant ISPs that largely control internet access in this country. At this point, they are out of step with just about everyone else.”
What does this mean for the cloud?
As we know, FCC chair Ajit Pai’s position on the policies of net neutrality are that they are unnecessary and unfair to larger broadband networks. The FCC 3-2 vote to eliminate the previous position on net neutrality last December, in turn giving ISPs more control over how, and at which speed businesses and consumers receive content using internet connections.
The fear that has been circulating since the vote for the FCC repeal of net neutrality is that broadband providers will have the power to throttle services, block websites, and censor content at their discretion. And in a worst-case scenario, some have raised concerns that for those that don’t actually own broadband networks could be at an extremely unfair advantage—even if ISPs are offering the information transparently—in the competitive market for services in the future. It will soon be possible for ISPs to control the performance of their competitor’s products and services, giving them unfair advantage.
The expansion of cloud computing will feel the direct effect of the uneven playing field that many are afraid will result from the repeal. It will become more difficult for smaller businesses to compete with larger organizations who are well-known and may already have relationships with ISPs. Ultimately, it will be the ISPs that choose which devices have the ability to reach full performance, and which sites are throttled. This raises a major threat of individual cloud services being throttled, putting small business in an unfavorable position. ISPs would assume control over the functionality of apps that require a fast connection that they may be hosting in their own data centers.
The threat of the net neutrality repeal feels particularly heavy for smaller and emerging businesses. They are much less likely to have the funds to compete with larger companies. The inventive flair that guides so many small business the courage to take on enterprise-level competitors will likely be understandably suppressed if they are expected to take on the complications the repeal of net neutrality will bring.
The defining rule of the internet are huge in dictating the success and ability for entrepreneurs to succeed without the added worry of navigating decisions by large ISPs. The lack of internet freedom suppresses the full flourishing of ideals of American businesses on many levels. The recent vote marks no end in the battle for internet freedom, but it indicates that the conversation will continue.
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