How Application Bias Harms the Net

In the fight for Net Neutrality, we can’t get lost in the nuance. Internet Service Providers would have us believe that certain types of network prioritization are innocuous. In truth, there’s a litany of hidden harms in any attempt to shape Internet traffic. This week, Free Press, along with the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, released a policy brief, The Hidden Harms of Application Bias, to identify and explain these issues.

Some pieces of the Net Neutrality puzzle are more black and white than others. If an ISP speeds up its own services and slows down the services of its competitors, it is unambiguously anticompetitive. Slightly more subtle is the question of whether an ISP should be able to sell priority access in the network to a software company like Google, allowing their Web site to load more quickly than others. Even if the ISP offers the same treatment at the same price to Microsoft, any competitor that's small and can't afford to pay will be kicked out of the market, and we might never have another garage or grad student inventor again. That’s startling, considering the amount of innovation that entrepreneurs at the edges of the network have generated.

Possibly the most complicated piece of the puzzle, though, is the question of application bias: ISPs putting applications into priority levels by type, such as prioritizing video and voice applications, while downgrading file transfer applications, for instance. Application bias sounds innocent at first -- slowing down applications that aren't time-sensitive in small increments so that other applications can move more quickly. But it's difficult for a network operator to get those priority decisions right, and the inevitable mistakes will create serious problems.

Hidden Harms explains why applications cannot be prioritized by ISPs without causing corresponding harm – sometimes substantial harm – to other applications. And the repercussions are significant: Consumer choice is frustrated when desirable traffic is slowed down; competition is harmed when the lines between applications are poorly drawn; and, worst of all, innovation is harmed because the garage inventor may face new and substantial obstacles to the development and adoption of new technologies.

Hidden Harms also explains that the real problems facing broadband are slow, small access connections. In sum, no prioritization tools or tricks will turn your slow DSL or barely faster cable modem connection into a fiber optic cable that can enable real-time high-definition two-way video teleconferencing. Network investment is the right answer, as it has been throughout the Internet’s history.

Ultimately, users should control how important their traffic is – and network operators shouldn't spend money on fancy and ineffective prioritization equipment, but on higher capacity networks and buildout into rural areas. ISP-imposed prioritization by type would harm the Internet by decreasing performance and restricting consumer choice and innovation.