Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Earlier this month net neutrality was back in the news, thanks to a U.S. appeals court ruling. The decision stated that the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, didn’t have the power to reinstate net neutrality rules—which the agency voted to do in April, with the encouragement of then-president Joe Biden.
Net neutrality is one of those issues that I’ve never quite fully wrapped my head around. So what is it, and what will happen now that the FCC can’t enforce it? Here to explain everything for us is Ben Guarino, an associate technology editor at Scientific American.
Ben, thanks for coming on to chat.
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Ben Guarino: Thanks for having me.
Feltman: This is a question I feel like I should be able to answer by now, but I can’t: What is net neutrality?
Guarino: So in the simplest terms, net neutrality is this idea that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. So if I am trying to access YouTube or Netflix or Hulu or really anything, my Internet service provider, my ISP, is going to treat all of those data packets coming from those websites like they’d be coming from any other website
Feltman: So why are we hearing about net neutrality in the news? What’s been going on with it?
Guarino: There has been a huge debate over whether net neutrality should exist in the United States. The Internet service providers, “Well, if you put these regulations on us, it’s going to stifle competition. It is against the American ideals of capitalism.”
And then you have consumers and Internet advocates and people who cherish the idea of the open Internet that really gets to the founding ideals of what the Internet should be—it should be free; it should be for the flow of information—that say, “We should, we should hold ourselves to net neutrality.”
And so it boils down to who should be regulating it. And the courts recently decided that the Federal Communications Commission cannot treat the Internet with net neutrality principles.
Feltman: Interesting. What’s next? What does that mean for people who are pushing for a free and open Internet?
Guarino: So if the FCC does not have the ability to regulate ISPs like a telecommunication service—that means that these services have to act in the “public interest,” which has higher standards that they have to be held to—if the FCC isn’t the one that can enforce these net neutrality principles, then it’s in Congress’s hands or it’s in the state’s hands.
Feltman: Okay, is this good news or bad news for the open Internet?
Guarino: It’s bad news for the people who advocate for the open Internet. So if there’s no federal oversight of net neutrality, what we have now are the state laws that support net neutrality. And these are on the books in lots of places—in Washington state, in Oregon, in California—and it had kinda looked like maybe they weren’t really being enforced because the thinking was, “Well, if there’s federal oversight of net neutrality, maybe we don’t have to worry about our own states.” Now that equation changes a little bit.
And the thing with the Internet is [laughs] it’s all connected, right? So you can’t—the, the borders of the Internet don’t stop in California, so if California has net neutrality laws on the books, there is some thinking there that, “Well, if ISPs in California are beholden to these laws, they’ll just follow them everywhere.” So that could be a silver lining for folks who want to see the principles of the open Internet upheld.
Feltman: And from the perspective of the ISPs, what’s limiting about net neutrality? What are they trying to do, hoping to do that this sort of free and open Internet won’t allow them to do?
Guarino: So the theory goes that if I can treat one data packet differently from another data packet, I could slow your traffic to Netflix. Maybe I have a competitor streaming service—and I should back up a second: we talk about net neutrality a lot in terms of video streaming because it’s data intensive and, like, something like two thirds of Internet traffic is video streaming, so that’s why, that’s why net neutrality and video services tend to go hand in hand. But if I am an Internet service provider and maybe I have a competitor website to Netflix or Hulu …
Feltman: Mm-hmm.
Guarino: And I want to have more people use my service, then I can slow their connection to Netflix and maybe shunt them towards my competitor. Or I can say, “Hey, Netflix, you guys have to pay me a little bit more if you wanna keep this fast connection.” And, you know, the concern there is: that bump in price that, that Netflix has to pay, that gets passed on to the consumer.
Feltman: Yeah, and what’s the, like, worst-case scenario there? I think in a lot of conversations about net neutrality, the implication is that it’s this, like, slippery slope that’s gonna fundamentally change the Internet. What’s the, the radically different Internet that people are worried we’re gonna find our way into?
Guarino: That’s a really good question. What I can say is, having talked to researchers like David Choffnes at Northeastern University, who studies what we would consider net neutrality violations—so he’s looked at how traffic that appears to go from my computer, let’s say, or my phone to Netflix and how ISPs in the United States treat that, and it turns out that whether or not the FCC had net neutrality policies on the books, whether states had their own net neutrality laws didn’t really matter in the United States. This study has been going on when we had FCC oversight, we haven’t had FCC oversight, we had FCC oversight again, and now we, we don’t, so—David told me he’s seen it all, and basically it [laughs], it doesn’t really matter.
David and his colleagues have seen, studying this since 2017, that your fixed cable Internet, there’s no net neutrality violations there in the United States—that, that they, they aren’t blocking or throttling traffic. But what they have found is, for certain users on certain data plans, that wireless providers have throttled some connections. And the thinking there is, historically, the spectrum was limited, connecting to cell towers and things like that, so maybe when everybody’s commuting home at 5 o’clock that they’re all requesting to watch Netflix on the subway or something, and it made sense to throttle that.
Now, if you go into a cell phone store, folks will tout their super-fast …
Feltman: Sure.
Guarino: 5G network things, so maybe that spectrum argument no longer holds water. But if they’ve done it historically, maybe they’d do it again. So all of that is to say, in the short term I don’t know that American consumers will really notice a difference. In the long term maybe the price of your Hulu or Netflix subscription jacks up a little.
Feltman: Sure, and with so many giant conglomerates owning so many different types of media and telecommunications companies, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that an ISP could also own some of the content you’re watching versus [laughs] other content, so, yeah, for sure.
Guarino: Maybe the only thing to note is: this has been going on for a really long time [laughs] …
Feltman: Yeah.
Guarino: The phrase “net neutrality” was coined by a Columbia legal scholar in 2003. So people have been thinking about this for a really long time, and it just—this debate has gone on—you know, even, even before it was coined, even before we had the term “net neutrality,” people have been thinking about the principles of the open Internet. So this certainly isn’t the end of net neutrality; even though it’s out of the FCC’s hands for the foreseeable future, this doesn’t mean that net neutrality is lost.
Feltman: Ben, thanks so much for explaining net neutrality to me. I finally understand it, and hopefully the Internet stays relatively free and open for the foreseeable future.
Guarino: Sounds great. Thanks for having me.
Feltman: [Laughs]
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Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and co-hosted by Ben Guarino. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
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