How Net Neutrality Works

talking about net neutrality. That is correct, but boy, we are just getting more and more lame with these intros, aren't we. Yeah, and that's probably because they're all my intros. No, No, might have been bad too. Let's let's move on to net neutrality. Okay, this is one of those buzz words that you hear a lot, and not everyone really understands what the term means. And part of that is because the term kind of means a lot of different things

to a lot of different people. But we'll we'll try and muddy the waters a little bit here, I mean, sorry, clear things up, and we're gonna are with just sort

of a broad definition of net neutrality. Not in general, net neutrality refers to being able to access all the different kinds of information that are on the Internet with any applicable device without any restrictions um, meaning that the different companies that own parts of the Internet don't restrict your access to any of the freely available stuff in

any way. Socialism, yes, socialism uh so. In other words, for what this would mean to you is that you would log onto your computer at home into onto the Internet, and you would be able to access any normal web page the same as any other normal web page, assuming there aren't any weird problems on the Internet at the time,

like the target server has gone down or something. Right, So, like your I s P, it doesn't matter what I s P you have, and it doesn't matter what site you're accessing, right, because you should be able to have the same you know, Ina provided their new problem technical problems, you should be able to have the same experience no matter who you're using. Right, you would be able to to access a web page at the same speed, no matter where you were going. So let's say you're getting

the news. Let's just go ahead and use an example. Let's say you want to get the news and you want to lug onto CNN Dot com and so you tell your your browser and okay, that's where I want to go. Well, on a net neutral platform, that means you could access it just as fast as if you were to access any other news site like MSNBC or BBC. Um you would you would access those sites equally quickly. Now here's where the issue comes in. As a lot of I sps kind of want to move away from

this net neutrality. It sort of hinders them in their mind. Um. And and it takes away one of their potential sources of revenue, which would be to make partnerships with certain content providers so that those content providers would get referential treatment. And you would say, if you were a Comcast customer, it's a Comcast makes a partnership with MSNBC, then MSNBC site might load significantly faster for you than say CNN

or BBC. And therefore, as a customer, you would be more likely to go to MSNBC because it would mean less waiting around. Right. And this is um, this is

not really a hot button issue probably for most people. UM. This is kind of a There's been some talk about it even in the presidential debates and two eight and UM, it's something I think you'd probably hear more as a you know, secondary or tertiary topic, but it does come up from time to time, and uh, you know, it's it's interesting to hear who exactly who wants uh net

neutrality and who doesn't. Right, there's even been an act that has not been there's been introduced on both in both houses of the American Congress for called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act UM. And basically this is it's still ongoing undergoing some debate in both houses. But the thing is um this would basically say, look, it doesn't matter who you have, you should everyone is entitled to the

same experience when they use the Internet. But the problem is there are other companies who would like to to throttle that band within you know, in some ways they have a good reason to do so. Right, it's not just it's not just revenue generation. No, that's true, because we're talking you know, we've talked about other some of these other topics before, you know, streaming audio and video, bit torrent um. You know, now that we have all these conveniences, now that a lot of us have high

speed internet connections at home. Uh, you know, people are using them and are using them. And that's a lot of you know, bandwidth, a lot of information traveling on the series of tubes. So we series of two. Well, we were talking about politics in the Internet, and we good talk about Steven's because he has mentioned anyway, um, let's talk about let's talk about the bandwidth issue. So bandwidth is not infinite. There is a finite amount of bandwidth.

It's and it it ends within the infrastructure. Okay, well, literally, the physical cables and fiber optics that make up the Internet's backbone can only hold so much information at one time. Now you can always add more. You can add more nodes, you can add more cable and so there's you know, there does there is a solution beyond just oh well it's full now, you know. It's kind of like the

whole build more roads idea for managing traffic. That's the other part is when you build more stuff, more people use it. Um It's kind of funny how that works out. But as as things like digital distribution of media come into play, where more and more companies are really looking at that as a possible way to to move into distribution,

you know, skip the whole blu ray DVD problem. A lot of people are are concerned that blue rays never going to mature as a full technology because by the time the prices come down, digital distribution will have taken its place. So here's the issue. Digital distribution takes up a lot of bandwidth. I mean if you're especially if you're talking about like a high definition movie. Yeah, huge files,

enormous files. So that if you want to get one of those files in a timely manner, meaning that you don't want to wait three months while your computer downloads, you know, a film, then you need a lot of bandwidth. You need the speed to be able to access these files. Um. Well, because this band what fills up the I s p s have to sit there and think, okay, well, how

are we going to manage this? Are we going to invest in putting down more hardware to meet demand or could we just sort of figure out a different way where we kind of do some traffic control. And that's where that's where some problems have popped up recently. Um. In fact, there's a pretty famous case with Comcast. I was wondering if you picked them for a reason. Yeah, well, I guess who I have is an I I S p um not anymore. Yeah, I'll go home and I'll realize, hey,

where my internet go? Um. Comcast has uh come under fire by the FCC for throttling traffic related to bit torrent users, although not necessarily bit torrent. I guess it could be anyone who's who's consuming tons and tons of bandwidth. Actually, again, I say it's funny that you mentioned that, because I read an article in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation was saying that yes, bit torrent was one of them, but there were other protocols affected as well. HTML, which is

the protocol that you normally used on a web page. Uh, not so much affected by this, but they had they had a test that they did and um bit to warrant Nutella and even the Lotus notes, the popular corporate email program. And I think this probably dates the information

a little bit. You know Natella too. But it wasn't just bit torrent, So they were apparently looking for other things that used a lot of bandwidth, uh, bit torrent and not tell A, both sharing file sharing pro programs and um what they were doing apparently was forging packets, and a packet is a little chunk of information when

you when you request something over the internet. Um, basically Internet protocol breaks it down where the machines do break it down into little chunks which travel over Internet protocol to get to your machine from the machine that's serving

it up. Well, what they were doing at Concast, apparently according to this this article I read, was they were making up extra packets and when they would when it would detect bit torrent um, it would basically throw some of these junk packets in there, which would disrupt the connection and cause it to break basically hang it up. Beyond just throttling, it's like sticking a stick through this spoke to your bicycle wheel. Golly, except with the last

road rash. Yeah. So so throttling, Uh, traffic is bad enough. That's where you you actually put in exterior control so that you slow down someone's traffic, giving that bandwidth, opening up that bandwidth for other users theoretically, um, but you're not really supposed to do that. In the FCC kind of spanked Comcast when when the allegations came to light that Comcast was throttling users, um, not literally throwing users bandwidth,

I should say, weren't coming to people's houses and strangling them. Um, although I guess some people probably felt like that, Yeah, yeah, that's nice visual Chrys. It will really come across in the podcast. Thanks. So anyway, Um, so, yeah, the FCC comes down, and this was a big deal because some people weren't sure the FCC really had the authority need to do this. In fact, contest was one of them saying,

who gives you the right to do this? And this is one of those things that that people are kind of they're kind of forging what net neutrality means and where the parameters are as we go along, because it is new ground, and so I think, you know, to be fair, we should look at it from the other from the company's point of view. Now, not everyone is

using that level of bandwidth. Really, from what I understand, it's less than five percent of users who are really cranking down all the goodies they can download from the Internet and and taking advantage of the fact that they

have this massive, unlimited connection. Um. The thing is, you know, these companies have responsibility their shareholders, and they need to make the most of their investment, and they don't you know, they'd love to have additional customers, and they I'm sure they probably really don't have a problem with us downloading all the videos and music as long as it doesn't get them in trouble with the different copyright holders. But you know that they're not really so much interested in that.

But they you know, every time they have to go out and add a new fiber optic line or or you know, upgrade their additional additional lines that cost them money to which cuts into the bottom line and hurts them in the shareholders. Uh, you know, they have a reason reasonably legitimate reason to uh do you do that? But the article that I read uh in c net Um Australians say that this is an American problem, Yes, because that that's where I read about you know, the

less than five percent. Well, uh, they say, basically, what we should do is limit the amount of information that we can we can download because essentially these few people are the ones costing everyone else. Uh. When it comes to net neutrality, they're saying, if you've throttled back on those select few people, then uh, you know, it won't be much of an issue and people won't be calling for the takeover of net resources. That I can I

can kind of see that argument. There's also the argument that some people make that if you were to regulate net neutrality it would hamper innovation in some way. And you're talking about Andy Kessler from the Wall Street Journal also talking about Bob Cohn, founders of the Internet. So yeah, because both of them then apparently said that it would

be anti competitive, right, it would. And well, it's more, it's not just the leaving a neutral it's the idea of regulation when you bring regulation into the picture, that somehow regulation automatically constricts innovation. Um. I think when we look at our economy sometimes we say that a lack of regulation could also cause problems. I'm just saying I'm not a huge fan of massive amounts of regulation either, but if it means preventing abuse, then I think it

does become necessary. And we're we're recording this before the the presidential election. Um so by the time this comes out, maybe maybe this has been decided one way or the other. But uh, it's interesting to look at how the candidates view net neutrality. McCain has said that he kind of he wants the market to take care of it, so, in other words, hands off lack of regulation, so really kind of against the whole regulating net neutrality, No, no big government hands off. Uh lazy fair. That was a

nice one. So Obama he uh, he believes in net neutrality, or at least has said that he would. He would favor net neutrality, which is interesting because his running mate Joe Biden does not favor net neutrality. So there's not really a clear cut choice for people who are really itching to use net neutrality is one of the one of their factors for voting, unless they, of course, they're completely hands off, from which case, you know, McCain is

pretty clear on the subject. Um. Obama's personal stance seems to be that, hey, we need to make sure that people have access to this information no matter who they choose. And as you pointed out, talking about an American problem that's not unique to the Australians. Europe seems to think the same thing. I've read that that in Europe the concept of net neutrality is also one of those things

where they they're afraid it's going to hamper competitiveness. But in Europe there are a lot more choices for I s p s, So you could if you knew ahead of time that this I s P partnered with these particular sites, you could shop around. You could say, hey, you know, that's not the website I prefer. I prefer this website. You could theoretically look around and get a different I S and use them in order to access

the Internet. And then maybe you're okay, maybe you don't care that the other sites are are throttled because the ones that you like are fine. Uh. In the United States, that's not really the case. We don't have that kind of choice. In most regions you have maybe two choices. Maybe some places you only you don't have a choice,

you have one, or you're not on at all. Well, there's satellite internet, Well okay, but then that has its own bandwidth throttling, which is due to the latency of the signal traveling up to the satellite, back down to the provider, and back up to the point being that you only have maybe one or two choices, maybe three uh max wherever you happen to be UM, as opposed to Europe, where you may have several, like maybe half

a dozen or even a dozen choices. UM. When you don't have that kind of choice, that's where the customer impact really comes into play. Yeah, and uh, as a matter of fact, you know the Internet basically started in the United States. I mean there's there's I'm sure that that other people have added on to it, but you know, as a Defense Department initiative essentially kind of the foundation

for the Internet. And and there you know, there were other people in the in the universities and some universities who are working on similar things. But when they got together, that was essentially what what made it happen. You'd think, you know, being the leader in creating this worldwide network that the United States would own, you know, the most bandwidth, and we wouldn't have in this country the fastest connection speeds.

But part of the reason that neutrality is such an issue is that the speeds in the United States are are if you take them in rank, the United States is not even in the top ten uh and fastest internet speeds. I mean places like South Korea and and I think Finland, I mean jan Japan, you know, double, triple, quadruple, usually the speeds that we get here on our our fastest internet connection. And you might you might wonder why that is. There's I can give you one simple reason.

I mean, it's not the only reason United States is big. Well, it's enormous. It's a lot hard to wire a country the size of the United States that it is South Korea. That's not the only reason, I mean, there are also other reasons, like a lot of these other countries have government funding that goes into these infrastructures, whereas the United States is private companies, so you've you know, you're looking at for the public good versus for private enterprise. Um,

that's a big difference as well. But size I think plays a huge role. Yeah, I think I think that's true. And it's just one of a number of issues. As you can tell, it's they're a bunch of different sides to this, and it's one of those things where it's not a top issue. But I think it's growing. I mean, just judging from the the amount of traffic it's getting. Uh, something I heard about a long time ago, and it's

popping up a lot more. I think it's going to become something that people can't ignore, at least here in the United States, when you've got Obama even suggesting having a Chief Technical Officer or a Technologies are um to look into this kind of thing. And there's some pretty big names that have been bandied about potentially to fill

this position. Um, I mean you know that it's starting to come into the forefront of that point where you're talking about the founding a new national office that would oversee this sort of thing. That's pretty good news. Well, that wraps up this discussion on net neutrality. If you want to read more about this and other topics, you should check out how stuff works dot com. And we'll talk to you again really soon, but more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works

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