TechTheDay

So Ajit Pai, head of the US Federal Communications Commission, is finally making headway into killing Net Neutrality. The death of Net Neutrality would spell the end of restrictions on ISPs to put a price on both Internet content access and speed. ISPs will now be able to sell content-based Internet connections, block current content gatekeepers, like YouTube, in favor of marketing their own content services, and put a price on content-based Internet speeds. This puts the fear that ordinary Internet access would be restricted and Internet speeds would be halted to a crawl. In reality, there’s really no proof that the Internet speeds would slow down. It was just one of the many possibilities that were put up there against those that were against net neutrality.

Net Neutrality ensures that ISPs cannot gatekeep content on the Internet and provide equal Internet speeds for everyone. But Ajit Pai claims that they discovered that fewer people are investing in ISPs now than there were before. And he claims this is because that ISPs are regulated by Net Neutrality. In a way, you can see the sense in this: less opportunity to profit means that a business is unprofitable. Why would you invest in a very unprofitable business? The reason to invest is to generate profit, but if entrepreneurs and businesses can’t come up with ways to generate profit then it is foolish to invest in them. In the end, there will be no more new investors because it will diminish the profit distributed among the investors more.

The gatekeepers of content on the Internet, like Google, campaigns for Net Neutrality simply because that if it was removed, the ISPs will be their main competition. The ISPs will be free to create content platforms and promote that instead of Google’s products say, for example, an alternative to YouTube. This will threaten Google’s monopoly on online streaming. There are other platforms currently existing, but they don’t provide the same benefits that YouTube does. Hence Google has much more share in the online streaming industry and the removal of Net Neutrality threatens that. While breaking Google’s monopoly, especially when the company is known to be very one-sided when it comes to issues of politics and privacy, should be a thing people support, that doesn’t mean that we should let ISPs do whatever they want. This is especially when what ISPs can do to Google they can also do to smaller platforms like vid.me or Dailymotion.

There’s also that huge probability that Ajit Pai is lying. He did work for Verizon, an ISP, a long time ago, so there’s also this suspicion that he’s “looking out for a friend.” But if what’s he saying is true, then there’s a danger that maintenance of the Internet’s infrastructure will be neglected in the future and this might cause the whole thing to come crashing down. Even if the ISP business ends up becoming a monopoly after investors leave and companies are merged and brought together, maintenance of the infrastructure wouldn’t be any easier. PLDT, Philippine’s major ISP, for example, has a monopoly over Philippine’s communications infrastructure and they don’t do a good job of maintaining it. Another problem with having no investors is that some areas will be left without internet connections because there’s no money from investors to build infrastructure. Some places in the US don’t have a good Internet connection or still don’t have any Internet connection at all.

Assuming all of the given information is true and accurate, how can we increase the number of investors for ISPs while making sure that they do not tamper or gatekeep content in any way? You cannot just go and demand people to invest their money in what they see as a regulated and unprofitable business. Google is currently investing to become an ISP too, though they already have a monopoly and gatekeeping powers over a lot of content on the internet so they’re already making money in other ways. And knowing Google’s bad business practices, this move just makes everything even worse.