Abstract :
The paper provides analogies on the net neutrality debate. The FCC justified its decision by noting that when customers pay an Internet provider, they´re primarily purchasing the ability to transmit (and receive) packets of data, just as customers pay phone companies to transmit and receive phone calls. That´s a reversal from 2002, when the FCC said that wired Internet access is an information service, more like websites and cable TV. AT&T has argued that Internet service providers (ISPs) obviously do more than just transmit data; if they didn´t provide a “computing functionality,” paid prioritization, blocking, or throttling bandwidth wouldn´t even be possible. It´s also common for people to compare Internet data to water flowing through pipes or electricity flowing through the power grid. Internet law expert Lawrence Lessig, for one, has compared a nonneutral Internet to an electrical outlet that provides electricity with different prices, quality, andreliability depending on the brand of appliance you plug in. Ever since U.S. vice president Al Gore popularized the term “information superhighway” in the 1990s, the analogy of trallic on a multilane road has been ubiquitous. Over the past few years, the Net neutrality debate has largely focused on paid prioritization, the idea that ISPs could charge content providers for a higher level of service. Some opponents said this was like adding tollbooths to previously free roads. The ISPs argued that paid prioritization was the equivalent of adding new, fast lanes alongside the existing lanes; other opponents shot back that ISPs were more likely to add speed bumps to some of the old lanes and relabel the remaining lanes “fast.”
