Without equal online opportunity, and the truly nondiscriminatory method of data presentation known as network neutrality, the internet as we know it will go the route of highly filtered and commercialized public radio and television networks. Partnerships between internet service providers (ISP’s) and large corporations are manipulating the equal opportunity of the internet into a custom playing field by which start-ups, and competition in general, must pay against deep corporate pockets in order to compete.

Large powerful telephone and cable companies, such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, are lobbying to abolish network neutrality by building out a new price-regulated infrastructure by which to charge consumers. The pricing model will allocate the majority of bandwidth, or data packet priority, to highly commercialized, or otherwise network sponsored, websites and services that will pay the infrastructure providers themselves for priority consumer facing visibility. As a result, early concept .coms, entrepreneurs, and those unwilling, or unable, to pay the exorbitant fees will enjoy far less speed and public exposure. Besides the obvious loss of choices, and overall value to the consumer, extracting competition stifles ingenuity. Before now, there was no other median to which you could take a $10 domain such as amazon.com and roll it into a billion dollar empire. Now, should Amazon happen to pay for sponsorship with a provider, you may have to compete directly with them for placement that could have been previously obtained with research and execution rather than sheer capital. The domestic economic impact of devaluing the experience of the internet for low paying users channels the majority of web traffic to sponsored sites, and in turn, shifts profits from smaller taxpaying businesses to trans-national mega-corporations not subject to local economies. Directing nonqualified consumers to generalized sponsored websites may divert prime converting traffic to settle on sales of unqualified goods and services under the guise of “convenience to the consumer,” and, “an open forum for all to compete.”
 
The issue at heart is nothing less than a battle over control of the internet or a shift from empowered consumers to regulated consumers. The value of the web was established as, and remains to this day, an ‘end to end’ entity, meaning that the bulk of available construct, we call the internet, is comprised by the aggregate of user contribution and computing power, whether for profit, recreation, or simply publicly accessible information under any label. Online content is not only user generated, but belongs intellectually to its creator, unless otherwise implied or contributed. What falls largely into question however, is the idea of regulated access to said content.

If large infrastructure is successful in its attempt to lobby congress, they will have the ability to ‘gate keep’ the intellectual property of others for the sole purpose of selling back to the consumer levels, or gradients, of ad density. Sponsored content will weigh heavy in lesser packages, based largely on the price a consumer pays for subscription. Where sponsoring is not blatant, partnered companies will enjoy larger allotments of allocated bandwidth giving the falsified impression of a superior service. In certain cases select competition to a sponsored company may simply be ‘incompatible’ with the service provider’s version of the internet. In other words consumers opting for an uninhibited, unfettered online experience, to which we have all grown accustom, will need to pay the highest of the monthly infrastructure provider offerings.

What we are witnessing is the shift of perceived entitlement of one type of service provider restricting the use of others. To the consumer the comparison can be likened to renting a hotel room, then paying again to rent the furniture; or paying to enter the zoo, then again to see the animals. Yes, internet service providers own the infrastructure, but not the content embedded within. Therefore they are not entitled to choose which services are available to a consumer, or the speed at which one service is delivered in contrast to another based solely on the representation fee it gathers from the company. Of actual entitlement, very little of the equation belongs to the infrastructure providers. They are simply not entitled to compensation for work that is not their own. 98% of what a user sees online is the efforts of other users. Routers, network hubs and centralized data centers are mostly established by the infrastructure providers to do the very necessary, low-level, function of relaying user generated content from one end user to another. Infrastructure providers already provide a service; to sustain the infrastructure, for which they are well paid. Taxing corporate entities in order to ensure that their web properties and services are delivered with priority and placement is a distortion of both ethics and free markets. Not to mention that their self-proclaimed ‘metamorphosis’ from infrastructure providers to middle men will surely pass the additional expense of the products and services we already use online back to the consumer.

Collecting unjustified additional compensation, in exchange for actively devaluing the user experience, is a disservice to the consumer. Beyond that it implies an ownership in user generated content, entitlement to regulation of consumer choices, substitution of ‘best answer’ for ‘paid answer’ and self-promotion from service providers to service middle men; all this to merit upward price flux for end users while simultaneously charging companies for placement, or even representation, under each internet service provider’s ‘version’ of the internet. It is more than apparent that we need some sort of federal regulation in the matter. Despite nationwide efforts to draft positive regulation out of a consensus of central issues we find ourselves often in disagreement because of the nature of the median and its supporters. This is largely because the idea of enforcement or standardization of a ruling governing the internet is a contradiction to the very principles for which it stands. It seems ironic that the crusade to sustain and protect a decentralized, nonpartisan, unregulated, free internet may prove its undoing when matched against the very pointed, exceptionally organized, corporate sponsored campaigns set to the contrary.