Net Neutrality Protests

I was puzzled recently when I came to know that major websites like Amazon, Kickstarter, Reddit, Mozilla and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will join an online protest in July 2017 in an event that was labelled “Internet-wide day of action”.  This protest is meant to protect net neutrality; a concept we are so oblivious about to the point we have taken it for granted.  These websites will either show banners to urge all users to act and voice their concerns, or will actually slow down their services on purpose to demonstrate what will actually happen if net neutrality is destroyed, a drastic way to protest but it only shows the seriousness of the situation.

This movement is led by Fight for the Future which is a non-profit advocacy group for digital rights.  To be honest, initially the idea of having digital rights seemed somehow trivial to me, it is only when I got into the potential ramifications I started to worry.

Net neutrality means that all data transmitted through the Internet should be treated equally.  It is applied to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and governments that regulate the Internet.  It states that no one can interfere or discriminate of how data is treated (either to give preferential and faster treatment or slower), regardless of the users, content, source, websites or purpose.  This principle gained popularity and importance many years back when major Internet Service Providers in the United States like AT&T were caught controlling and lowering the speed of websites and services that belonged to their competitors.  In such practices, Internet Service Providers were degrading the performance of Internet services of others in order to make their own more attractive and faster, pushing their subscribers to abandon Internet services of their competitors, or even to lower the performance of some Internet applications for the Internet users who belonged to low-priced Internet packages.

This topic has been in discussion for few years now, whenever it rose to the light it caused so much controversy that it died rather quickly.  However, recently the Federal Communications Commission voted to undo the net neutrality protections that were applied during the Obama administration and have proposed new regulations to that effect which was provided for the public to comment on.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of Federal Communications Commission, has earlier stated that he intends to remove or ease up the regulations on Internet Service Providers just like other utilities such as water and electricity, an argument that is considered a fallacy by many.  It is obvious that the consequences have not been taken in consideration.

From the history we can imagine what will happen when Internet Service Providers have the freedom on how to treat data.  Startups and small to medium providers of Internet-based services and applications are at a high risk and they will be run out of business by the giant Internet Service Providers.

A similar protest took place back in 2014 by Google, Twitter and Netflix as an example which stopped the Federal Communications Commission back then in permitting Internet Service Providers to create fast and slow Internet lanes.  Having such lanes would discriminate between users, subscribers and sources of Internet traffic.

The latest proposal of Federal Communications Commission to restructure the open Internet rules have gathered so far over 5 million comments and their website crashed in May 2017 due to the huge load and number of visitors.  And when this protest goes online, all the visitors to those major websites will be asked to comment against the new proposal, which many expect the Federal Communications Commission’s website to crash again, another testimonial for how much the public is against the direction of removing net neutrality.

I shudder at the thought if such direction reaches us here in the Kingdom of Bahrain.  The impact that it will have on the local websites and Internet applications could be devastating.  I would like to think that here in our Kingdom we raise above selfish-driven regulations that aim to benefit specific organizations on the expense of the society.  I am glad for the maturity of our telecommunications regulations.