The Comcast affair (and recent China and Pakistan filtering) brings the spotlight on a Pandora box that must not be opened: net neutrality.

Network neutrality basically states that your internet service provider shouldn’t control what you have and don’t have access to on the internet.

The Comcast affair

Recently, Comcast decided to block the BitTorrent traffic. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file-sharing program that can be used for many things, and that is widely used for exchanging pirate copies of movies, applications and music album.

What Comcast does is: when your computer connects to a BitTorrent service, it sends a message to the remote computer on your behalf, telling him: “I now want to stop this conversation”. That is clearly against Net neutrality.

Comcast advocates that BitTorrent clients cost them too much bandwidth, and that they do it for the sake of its user and of the internet. They probably do it for their shareholders too. And maybe for the RIAA/MPAA.

There currently are FCC hearings about it, and apparently Comcast uses unethical tactics, such as paying people to block seats and prevent net neutrality advocates to be heard.

The Pandora box

Now, only blocking BitTorrent isn’t so bad in itself. What is bad is that it opens the door to the corporations deciding what you can see and not see on the Web, for what ever reason. This the “weapons of mass destruction”-type excuse, applied to their cause: the “it slows down the network” excuse. Bear with me.

Without net neutrality, the corporations will be allowed to block content based on any corporate policies and interests that can be justified by the excuse. You can imagine major ISPs pressuring YouTube to remove an anti-McCain or anti-Obama video, or they’ll get blocked. Because the political video is seen by millions of persons, we can scientifically say that it slows down the network in some way.

This could also allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down content will allow them to charge more for specialized content (see image below).

YouTube, Facebook and your favorite news hub slow down the internet because million of people access them. So you should pay more to access those, because your are contributing to the slowdown. The Comcast video portal, news site and personal pages however will probably be free.

You want the Comcast subscribers to be able to see your company’s web site? You might need to pay them to unblock it. Because your site will slow down the network if people access it. Very slightly, but still.

Indeed, this is the internet apocalypse, and we are probably years or decades away from it. Yet, the first step toward this SciFi scenario is opening the net neutrality Pandora box.

In the end, killing net neutrality is permitting the internet service providers to censor the internet. Internet access is about access to information. And just like China, there is a lot of information corporations would benefit you not having access to.

Further reading

• Net Neutrality, at Wikipedia
• The Net Effect of Neutrality, at Technology Review
• Thanks to BitTorrrent, Net neutrality debate reignites, at News.com
• Net Neutrality Canada

Above, Apocalyptic SciFi scenario image found on Digg

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