The issue of net neutrality is not as black and white as it appears.

With all of the recent pro-net neutrality campaigns and even a positive backing from President Barack Obama, it may seem as if there is no downside to the matter at all.
And while most people, including myself, are in favor of the Federal Communications Commission’s recent net neutrality proposal, it is important to understand the ramifications that a government regulated Internet might bring.

Internet service providers such as Comcast and Verizon argue that net neutrality could harm the innovation of faster networks in the future. If ISPs aren’t allowed to charge more for providing priority access to higher speeds, they won’t have incentive to invest in infrastructure that creates a faster Internet for them to sell. Some people might feel that the current Internet is plenty fast already, but the United States currently ranks 26th in the world in terms of average upload and download speeds, according to Ookla Speedtest.

While ISPs are usually painted as the bad guys, they deserve credit for their innovations attempting to bring faster speeds to the U.S.

Verizon launched its fiber-optic network Verizon FIOS in 2005, which claims to have the fastest Wi-Fi available of any provider in the country. Comcast has upped its speed from 3 Mbps in 2003 to between 25–50 Mbps today according to a Jan. 28 Vox.com article.

And the most groundbreaking network innovation, Google Fiber, boasts an Internet service that is 10–50 times faster than typical broadband. Google announced last week that it will expand Google Fiber to Atlanta, Nashville, Tennessee, Charlotte, North Carolina and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina metropolitan areas joining Kansas City, Missouri, Austin, Texas and Utah.

All of this progress could soon come to a halt if the FCC’s proposal is accepted later this month. Experimenting and implementing these new methods of streaming data is extremely expensive. If net neutrality is enforced, ISP’s may choose not to the devote millions of dollars for network improvements fearing a lack of return on investments and additional government regulations that might restrict ISP’s pricing models.

This conversation isn’t so much about the speed of the Internet as it is the principle of sacrificing innovation. Net neutrality protects fairness to new Internet startups but it also hurts the creativity of ISPs looking to have the fastest network speeds for the lowest prices on the market.

It is actually ironic that the FCC’s plan to protect the free and open Internet is to implement government regulations. As time passes and new technologies are created, even more regulations will have to be put in place to account for them. We could be heading for a never-ending slope of government intervention on the so-called open Internet.

The passing of the proposal could also lead to bitterness from ISPs and cause a rift in the ISP/consumer relationship. These few companies that practically control the data highway are probably not the ones you want to make angry.

I do believe the net neutrality proposal should and will get approved, however, people need to be aware that there are two sides to this discussion.

Net neutrality does not mean happily ever after. This story is just beginning.

Aarick Knighton is a junior information management and technology major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at adknight@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @aarickurban.

Published on February 11, 2015 at 12:30 am