2009 in review: Net neutrality

The debate on net neutrality has raged throughout 2009

The end of 2009 has seen US regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) consider legislation to protect net neutrality, while the European Union has passed the Telecoms Reform Package which promotes a competitive broadband market without net neutrality regulation.

The debate on net neutrality revolves around whether telcos should be allowed to intentionally speed up or slow down traffic based on which service or application is being used.

While telecoms operators claim that they should be able to control service availability and access in order to provide a better quality of service to users, opponents argue that they want control in order to favour their own services over competitors'.

The European Parliament voted in favour of giving broadband operators such rights in May after two years of debate.

Opposition to the ruling has come from digital rights groups and large online firms like Google, Amazon, Twitter, Skype, Facebook, Mozilla and YouTube.

The digital rights organisations are concerned that limiting net neutrality will have disastrous consequences for competition, innovation and citizens' freedoms in the European Union, particularly considering that the US is making a radical move to protect net neutrality.

The web firms, meanwhile, promote net neutrality in order to escape the costs associated with expanding the networks and bandwidth capacity required for video and other emerging applications.

They have also argued that an open internet fuels an efficient marketplace where consumers make the ultimate choices about which products succeed and which fail, thereby allowing businesses of all sizes to compete.

Key telecoms firms and internet operators opposing net neutrality legislation, such as AT&T and ComCast, have argued that the government should not be allowed to tell them how to run their networks. And digital rights groups such as La Quadrature du Net are holding such firms responsible for the outcome of the EU decision because of their persistent lobbying.

The ISPs are currently focused on the regulations being considered by the FCC. After simply opposing the regulation, AT&T has shifted its position slightly in order to appeal to the regulator's endorsement of citizen freedoms.

In an open letter sent to the FCC, AT&T’s head of external and legislative affairs, James Cicconi, said that the open character of the internet should be preserved, although he continued his usual tone and arguments during the rest of the letter.

Cicconi maintained that the FCC should focus on "unreasonable and anti-competitive" forms of discrimination that would adversely affect customers, but should not introduce non-discrimination rules as this would ruin creative and innovative services.

European commissioner Viviane Reding made a speech in October focusing on the issue, saying that Europe's "pro-competition" regulation protected web users better than the US approach, and argued that European consumers are in a better position than their US counterparts.

Europeans have a better choice of competing broadband service providers than US consumers under the strongly deregulated US telecoms market, she said.