Now that President Obama has taken office, he will be guiding policy on a wide breadth of issues. Some of the issues that are relevant to Americans revolve around technology, and it is important that Obama sign legislation to nip some disturbing trends in the bud.
One of the very important issues is “network neutrality” – the idea that Internet providers should not be allowed to restrict the kind of traffic that travels across their networks. That is, the Internet was designed for any user – from students to business innovators – to create content and put it on the web.
People can create personal blogs and publish them on the web with the same freedom as a news company can publish news stories. And because of the openness of the web, small companies can innovate and compete based on the merits of their services.
There is a growing desire, however, for service providers to filter content. To disallow certain kinds of traffic, like Bittorrent, allow others, like news. Youtube videos might be shown at slower speeds, whereas financial news might be given a priority on bandwidth.
This kind of behavior is essentially discrimination against different types of web traffic. Computer science professor George Rouskas agrees that discrimination against certain web services should not be allowed.
This kind of tiered networking policy would stifle innovation, says Rouskas.
The United States is lagging when it comes to making sure that people have access to broadband Internet, and this is hurtful to our nation. The people who will innovate the most in technology will be the people who have the broadest access to Internet resources, argues Rouskas.
In order for the U.S. to maintain leadership in technology, we have to make sure that we do not allow Internet providers’ thirst for money to drown out the common good.
Barack Obama’s website states he will “Support the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.” Perhaps it is time for us to consider, as Rouskas puts it, a “Manhattan Project” equivalent for broadband.
The idea would be for the United States to invest in providing far-reaching, reliable, high-quality broadband to its citizens. That kind of investment would propel the U.S. forward in technology and countless other innovations would spring up from that investment. The same way many of our current innovations came from Department of Defense-related research, unforeseeable benefits and technologies would emerge if we made it a priority to forge sound Internet policy and technology.
In the past, the United States government decided that it was worthwhile for everybody to have access to telephone lines and that people in cities would pay slightly higher phone costs to subsidize phone lines in rural areas. Congress should recognize that the Internet has similar value to society, and it should guide policy with that in mind.
