Whose Web Is It, Anyway?

Imagine an alternative reality in which you attempt to do a routine online search. In this Bizarro World, your Internet service provider (which happens to be one of the four top dogs: Comcast, AT&T, Verizon or Time Warner) has a deal with Yahoo, but not Google. You try your search on Google first but notice the page loads very slowly. Impatient, you try again on Yahoo, which is running noticeably faster. Over time, you default to Yahoo's apparently faster search engine whenever you look something up.

Welcome to one vision of a world without "Net neutrality." In the neutral Internet of today, we're accustomed to accessing any Web site at any time, at the fastest speed available. This applies to corporate sites as much as it does to start-ups and individuals. For now the virtual playing field is fairly level.

But that could change. Internet service providers want the authority to speed up or slow down the delivery of Web content depending on what business arrangement they may or may not have with a certain site. That's not in keeping with the principles of Net neutrality, says the Save the Internet Coalition. Before your eyes completely glaze over, activists and academics want you to take note. "I hope people understand why this is so significant," says Lawrence Lessig, founder of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. "The whole question is whether people will feel confident to innovate and build products and content for the Web without the fear that the network owner will pull the plug."

For example, Lessig argues, if Comcast were to deliberately slow the upload time for applications like BitTorrent, which lets users exchange large files such as videos (and, as such, can be viewed as a competitor to Comcast's on-demand movie business), the company would be competing unfairly and violating the integrity of a democratic Internet. It would also encroach upon the privacy of Comcast's customers, critics say, because the service provider would need to peek at their customers' transmissions in order to know which ones to slow down. Unfortunately this is precisely what Comcast has been doing. The Internet provider claims that delaying peer-to-peer file-sharing is necessary to offset congestion across the network, which can slow down other people's connections.

In what may be a watershed moment for the Net neutrality debate, on Monday the Federal Communications Commission held a public hearing at Harvard Law School to determine whether Comcast was manipulating its network traffic in a "reasonable" manner. (Watch it here.) "There wasn't a lot of argument over the facts of the case: they were slowing down BitTorrent," says David Weinberger, a research fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. "The question is: is this a violation of policy, and if so what happens to Comcast and more importantly what happens to the policy?" A spokesman for the FCC would not speculate on when the commission would issue a decision. Also this week, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued a subpoena asking Comcast for "information" (a Cuomo spokesman declined to elaborate to NEWSWEEK).