While the issue of net neutrality has become a hot topic in recent months, many questions continue to swirl about its future in the United States.
Recently, as part of a meeting of OARnet’s OARtech group (an information-sharing group involving technology staff from OARnet's member institutions and OARnet engineering and client services representatives), Michael Glassman, Ph.D., presented and led a discussion on net neutrality, dissecting many of the uncertainties surrounding the issue and what it could mean to higher education.
“An important argument now is that the internet should be considered a common carrier and everything should be equal in terms of how the internet works,” said Glassman, an education psychology professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Educational Studies. “The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) oversees the internet, as it does all communications, and recently (mid-December) made the decision it no longer needs to be treated as a common carrier. What that means is certain information packages from certain content providers could be given priority over other content providers.”
Glassman said nobody is sure what exactly will happen because the repeal hasn’t yet gone into effect. However, he said the fear is that smaller content providers will be unable to compete. This could pose a problem for open educational resources (OER) in higher education, which are intended to reduce student costs and expand access. Glassman said most OERs are independent, and ending net neutrality could make it hard for smaller labs to use big data downloads.
“Higher education is going to be the driving force in open educational resources,” said Glassman, whose recent book is titled Educational Technology and the Internet. “The only online textbooks people are going to be able to use are going to be from sites that can pay for it; textbooks can take a long time to download. Content’s not going to disappear from the internet, it’s just going to take a longer time to deliver it.”
OARnet’s Interim Executive Director, Paul Schopis, said it’s far from a settled issue because some entities are fighting the repeal. Even if it is enacted, the future of the internet is far from clear.
“We don’t yet know how this is going to affect us; we don’t think it will because of the way we acquire our services,” Schopis said. “And we basically practice net neutrality here. There are some obvious exceptions, but we built our network to be high performance, and we’re here to support research and education.
“We want to have all of our schools’ content available to one another and all of the research available, so we don’t do anything that would impede that.”
Mark Beadles, OARnet’s information security officer, said the advantage OARnet has is making “collaborative decisions based on community input. If you look at the high-traffic services that are in the most demand within our community, OARnet has traditionally provided ways to make sure that you can get that content quickly and reliably.”
Glassman said one reason this issue is so murky and controversial is because many don’t understand the history of the internet.
“That’s dangerous, especially with regard to net neutrality,” Glassman said.
Glassman said the conceptual aspect of net neutrality is related to the idea the internet should be treated as a common carrier, such as the post office or even roads. In the beginning stages of the internet, service providers were considered managers of information and researchers and scientists didn’t want the government taking money from research and controlling the internet. As the internet evolved and became so prevalent in our society, that attitude has evolved.
Glassman said the emphasis used to be on content providers, but has changed to looking at how end users are affected. However, he said for the most part end users won’t notice much change.
“But some content providers will disappear,” he said. “Really big content providers, like Netflix and Amazon, may even get faster. It’s the content providers who are unable to prioritize; their downloads may take longer and longer (if carriers choose to prioritize only high revenue generating traffic).”
