[dropcap]N[/dropcap]et neutrality (NN) is a hot button issue within the global tech community at present. In fact, to many it’s the hot button issue. One that goes far beyond cursory daily use of YouTube or Facebook. While the day to day nature of political debate often sees the impact of some issues overemphasised, when it comes to the battle for net neutrality, it’s a high stakes affair: for every region around the world, certainly, but especially within the Caribbean.
The December 2017 repeal of NN in the US by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was nominally a national issue, but one with real implications in the Caribbean. And this could be just a sign of bigger changes to come for us.
WHAT IS NET NEUTRALITY?
At its foundation, the issue of NN is an example of ‘the great exception’. Usually governments determine the laws of their own land but have a more limited impact on global assets. On certain issues, like money laundering and terrorism, many nations align their laws, given the recognition that a threat is local and global. NN falls between the cracks.
NN is neither a global issue that will find widespread agreement, nor a local issue whereby a sovereign government can solely determine the impact on its people. But each arena will have an impact on the other. Especially because, at its core, the internet is both a public utility used in our personal lives and is also a vehicle for private global business.
The principle of open internet access in democratic nations requires internet service providers (ISPs) to not unreasonably interfere with a user’s access. There are some exceptions to this: it can be as simple as a user finding their service cut off because they have not paid their bill but the exceptions to the principle are narrow.
That’s why any removal of the existing regulations in many nations that prevent ISPs from blocking, monitoring or otherwise controlling a user’s experience of the internet is forbidden.
Advocates for change argue that existing regulations are replete with red tape, and that excessive regulation by the government restricts the right of a user and business to form private contracts for varying services.
ENDING NET NEUTRALITY
There are some arguments advanced for an end to net neutrality, done so with the claim that consumer freedom will rise and inefficiencies of online use will decline. With the end to net neutrality in the US, paid prioritisation could now ensure a doctor providing an emergency consultation via a remote service would have access to faster speeds over someone watching a forgettable movie on Netflix.
In complement to this, services could also charge varying amounts for premium and non-premium access. A hospital may need to pay a premium for ultra-fast internet but Netflix viewing could be priced at a lower scale.
The problem with this argument is that ISPs can already provide varying internet plans; the diminishment of regulation that mandates fair access for all could eventually see the comprehensive access that all users have to the internet today (internet speeds notwithstanding) become the domain of an elite few, with the sizeable finances to match growing access costs.
The experience of Portugal, where Portuguese internet users now have to pay extra to use social media apps like WhatsApp and Twitter, shows that the risk of higher prices is considerable.
Similarly, with a greater ability to block content, ISPs could, in theory, cease access to content that is harmful and against the public interest. Any reasonable member of the Caribbean family could identify the benefits in great powers that restrict access to content that advocates for terrorism, preaches hate crime, or provides access to illegal pornography.
Identifying potential benefits is one thing; enacting them is another. And even though all people of good will would like to see less content like the above available on the internet, its presence also allows for law enforcement to identify perpetrators who engage in crime, and bring them to justice accordingly.
Allowing private business to make determinations about what content should be in the public domain is fraught with difficulty, not only for its ability to run aground of free speech principles, but also the potential for obstruction of justice.
NOT THE TIME, NOT THE PLACE
A further problem with advocacy for ending NN is its tensions with broader public interest in this time and era. Where many nations are seeing citizens’ (already limited) civil rights diminished, the capacity for democratic nations to advocate effectively for change, while also permitting net neutrality, risks being ‘an own goal’.
This, in a period of history when 1.3 billion Chinese are increasingly embattled in their day to day access to the internet in the era of Xi Jinping’s ever-expanding Great Firewall, and a revisionist Vladimir Putin in Russia is held to have interfered in the US presidential election via a mass campaign of fake news.
The revelation that the FCC decision followed on from mass submissions of fake comments and consumer complaints only enhanced the view of many that this is a time when free and open internet access should not be limited, but secured; at the very least, seeing a continuation of the Obama-era policy instituted in 2015 ensuring robust protection surrounding open access.
And for all the complexities and minutiae of the debate, when the UN defines internet access as a human right and net neutrality can diminish the quality of that access, that’s an issue. While the US has gone one way ending net neutrality, the European Union is holding firm following reforms in recent years to enshrine the open access in its region.
THE GATHERING STORM
While advocates for an end to NN in our region, like Digicel, cite it as an avenue to provide for business, the argument fails to recognise that the internet is, at its core, an innovator’s domain. NN might provide a more secure playing field for existing business but the internet is not just the property of existing business; it belings to future business, too.
The rise of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, notwithstanding the social media companies’ present turbulence with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, have all been dependent on an open internet that allowed founders room to create, engage and grow.
And most of all, if changes to NN occur, pressure will be brought to bear not on the prime ministers, presidents, and leaders of the day but on the future innovators in the Caribbean tomorrow: a young boy in Jamaica, a young girl in Barbados, an existing business trying to get online in Grenada, an entrepreneur deciding to grow something online for his community here in Saint Lucia.
These folks should not be denied the tools and fair access with which Americans built tech empires, and that Europeans continue to enjoy. It’s for the next generation of internet users, more so than us here and now, that NN must remain.
THE FUTURE
Net neutrality is an issue that strikes at the heart of what it means to have a free and open society. It is also a case of the public interest being met for the masses. For all the inflammable statements and combustible elements of contemporary political debate, rarely are issues clear-cut. There are always shades of grey involved.
But for people of the Caribbean on an individual level, on a regional level as a community of nations and indeed on a global level, this is an issue that is bruising today, and risks growing bitter wounds tomorrow.
The Caribbean region is one where so much potential exists for the greater growth of business and national economies via greater online access. An end to net neutrality locally would not only risk seeing the region turn the page on that growth and miss an opportunity in this generation, but risk closing the book on it forever.
Digicel were contacted for comment but did not provide a reply in time for publication.
