TechNotes #7: Net Neutrality, Part 1
Written by Matthew Stein Wednesday, 11 August 2010 19:23
When this whole "Internet" thing started, it was pretty simple. Well, okay, it wasn't exactly simple, but it didn't have too many rules. After all, when things got started there weren't very many people using this new communication technology, so there wasn't much of anybody to fight with over bandwidth (or how much stuff you can send over the lines at the same time).From that rather uncomplicated origin came a very egalitatian system of sending data from one place to another, and for our purposes, the flow of traffic will make a good analogy. Pieces of data traveling on the Internet (the term most often used in general conversation is "packets") don't just travel on a single line from Google to your home computer. In between they have to go through what are called routers, which are somewhat like intersections in roadways.
The Digital Roadways
When a packet arrives at a router, it's directed along the next leg of its journey in much the same way as you use the names on street signs to figure out which way to go, except that the router gives the directions and the packet just goes where it's told.
Like the intersection of streets, where there's a finite amount of space for cars to drive through, routers only have so many resources available to send on packets at any given moment. They're limited by their own capacities (the size of the intersection) and the lines they're connected to (the traffic conditions of the roads that lead to and from the intersection). Also like an intersection, there are rules for how those resources are shared.
At a four-way stop, the first person to arrive goes first, and so on in the order in which people arrive at the intersection. Routers have traditionally provided the same service: first-come firt-served. This is the practical idea of net neutrality. It means that the intersection (router) doesn't care who you are or what kind of car you drive, everybody (and their packets) gets treated the same.
The Hitch
In the last few years we've started using the Internet a lot more, and sending a lot more data across the lines. Text is easy to send. It's the equivalent of pedestrian traffic (only much faster, since the speed of light is the speed of light no matter how much data you're sending). But now we send music, and pictures, and feature-length films, and that's meant we need wider roads and bigger intersections.
Of course that doesn't just happen on its own. There's no switch to flip to just turn on more bandwidth. Infrastructure has to be built, and that costs money. It is this fundamental issue that brings net neutrality into question.
In part 2, we'll see what some would propose to do to solve this problem, and some of the arguments for and against those proposals.
Do you have a tech question you'd like answered? Click on the "Contact Me" link and let me know!
