Net Neutrality and Education
What Net Neutrality means for education, and why it matters to you.
Increasingly, sophisticated educational platforms are appearing as well. Educators are looking for ways to deliver their content directly to students over the Internet. Some of this may be misguided and motivated only by savings (I don’t approve of virtual classes in place of real ones) but other innovations are offering real education to students who would never have been able to access it before. Some of this requires significant bandwidth, such as streaming video.
This is exactly the kind of content that monopolistic Internet companies hate. It consumes the bandwidth they claim to sell in unlimited quantities (and then restrict if they can) and doesn’t produce any new revenue for them. They’re fine with high bandwidth usage if it’s something they can sell or partner with someone else to sell. But free is a four letter word, when we’re talking about corporations. Not that I’m full-on anti-capitalist here, but let’s be honest. Corporations exist to make money.
Net Neutrality protects the availability and the independence of free education. Without principles of Net Neutrality, education available on-line may either be crippled at the whim of those controlling the infrastructure of the ‘net, or else be forced to partner with huge corporations in order to survive. Even if we believe, for a moment, in the benevolence of large corporations and assume that they’ll give a break to do-gooder efforts, this still requires educators to get in bed with corporations. And no one should ever be comfortable with that – certainly not as a requirement to simply function.
What’s most likely, in this scenario, is that the only fast, reliable services will be those sponsored by companies on the inside. This is counter-innovative and anti-democratic. Not to say a large company can’t produce a good service, but if they are never forced to compete with the new kid on the block then their motive to do so is severely limited. This is why monopolies are bad. The Internet is already (sadly) very monopolistic. Net Neutrality is about limiting the ways in which the companies that are in on this monopoly are allowed to exploit their advantage.
Learn more at SaveOurNet.ca. Become informed, and talk about the issues. You don’t need to agree on every point, but please take the time to understand it. The biggest danger, with the Internet, is that we may lose a freedom we never even understood enough to appreciate, until it was already too late.
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In the interest of disclosure, I serve on the board of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), responsible for the dot-ca domain space. CIRA has no official position on Net Neutrality, and the views expressed here are my own.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.
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Well put, muchly needed, and great to see Jeff!
I agree with the need for Net Neutrality, for some of the reasons outlines here, and because, as a Computer Engineer, I tend to do… unusual… things with internet traffic. For me, having all my data treated equally is essential.
That being said, there is one legitimate technical reason opposing simple Net Neutrality that I think deserves mention. As Jeff mentioned, different types of internet traffic do different things to a network. The simplest examples come from streaming services, such as VOIP and live video, versus the traditional bulk data transfer.
These different kinds of traffic have different needs. For VOIP, for instance, latency is the key factor; that is, it is essential that relatively small amounts of data make from point A to point B very very quickly, and preferably in order. For that 500MB movie trailer, latency is not nearly as important as sheer throughput. How quickly the individual bits arrive is not as important as how many arrive per second.
As different types of traffic have different needs, smart network engineers can design their networks to improve performance of both streaming services and bulk data transfers. A situation where everyone wins.
Again, given the realities of competitive service providers, I’d rather have the assurance that I can do with my internet connection as I damn well please, but it is important to understand that an overly simplistic approach to net neutrality effectively stifles a whole (if limited) area of potential innovation.
Completely agree with Travis on this. As we move more to distance based working and learning, net neutrality will need to be tempered. The doctor operating on you by tele-robotics cannot suffer a lag-spike because the guy in the care ward above is grabbing streaming video of his stock quotes.
Net neutrality needs to be pursued in terms of private entities remaining neutral to traffic origins or destinations, but net non-neutrality based on the type of traffic is certainly worth keeping on the table.
I do agree with Travis’ points, and I nodded to them in general terms in the original write-up. There may be justifiable exceptions to absolute Net Neutrality, but let’s damn well hear the justifications each and every time. There’s an awful lot of bad reasons to depart from neutrality, and only a few good ones.
I’ll be happy enough if we get laypeople into this dialogue. Like most issues, at the end of the day, policy is written by a small group of very specialized people who understand the issues in depth. But policy also has to be motivated by a large number of people who know, at least in broad terms, what they want and what’s at stake.
As long as Canadians voice their concern on this topic, I trust that the appropriate complexity will be added in execution. Or at very least, I’m willing to leave that problem until nearer to the end of the discussion. But I do agree with the points made.
Jeff, thanks for getting the word out, glad you were able to attend the meetup. I am recommending the following video from Amber MacArthur to explain the state of net neutrality in Canada:
http://ambermac.com/articles/2008/04/05/net-neutrality-in-canada-video-news-update
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