Residents of smaller cities and rural areas would be especially hard hit by the Federal Communications Commission’s expected repeal of net neutrality with a vote scheduled for Thursday, but every American who uses the internet would be affected, according to technology experts.
Only a handful of companies provide internet service, meaning competition is limited even in the largest urban areas and “half the market isn’t able to make a choice,” said Sid Stamm, associate professor of computer science and software engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
Stamm previously served as lead architect and engineer on security and privacy for Mozilla.
Terre Haute isn’t exactly a metropolis but its 61,000 residents can get internet service from such providers as Frontier, AT&T, TimeWarner Spectrum, satellite dish companies and Joink, a local internet provider and technology solutions business.
But Stamm’s home is nine miles from the Larry Bird statue in front of Hulman Center, putting him in the half of the market where options are especially limited.
“I can select really poor options that give me really slow internet; I don’t consider that an option,” he said.
Service is limited in rural areas because of the cost of running fiber optics and other components of the required infrastrucure, Stamm said. “It has become increasingly expensive … to build out infrastructure where there aren’t a lot of people. We’re disenfranchising the people who are building our food.”
“Many Americans now lack access to low-priced, ubiquitous, world-class fiber optic services,” said Dennis Trinkle, director of the Center for Information and Communication Sciences at Ball State University. “The proposed changes will make this problem worse and add content limitations to the equation.”
Currently, most internet users pay for service on a sliding scale. Those who use more data than their neighbors pay more.
“What we’re seeing [now] is completely reasonable, Stamm said. “It costs money to move things from one place to another and this is akin to paying the electric company to use a little more electricity.”
But the removal of net neutrality means internet providers could determine how consumers use data and charge more to use certain types of data, Stamm said.
“That’s like your electric company telling you you can use your refrigerator but you can’t cook food,” he said. “That’s a different ballgame. You pay a provider to give access to the internet, not to give you access to sports. You should be able to use the whole internet when you sign up for service, not just parts.”
The internet has evolved to the point consumers use it like a commodity or utility such as electricity and it should be regulated like a utility, Stamm said.
Trinkle believes service providers would immediately gain more power, including limiting speeds for certain services or websites and charging competitors more for running content on their networks.
YouTube and Netflix account for more than 70 percent of network traffic during prime-time hours. With the proposed changes, those services could be restricted and/or charged more by service providers for access or preferential download speeds, Trinkle said. That would mean fewer dollars to invest and almost certainly higher prices for consumers, he said.
And consumers won’t be able to turn to the public library, coffee shop or wi fi “hot spot” for access to sites at the speeds they want or need, according to Stamm.
“Potentially, it could affect all access to the internet,” he said. “At some point, it’s a lot of interconnected networks and there are a few large organizations that control the central points of the internet that move data back and forth.”
Libraries and coffee shops “may not be taking advantage of the lack of any rules about internet access, but whoever they purchase from does. It’s all regulated no matter how you get on the internet.”
Even freedom of ideas and expression can be affected, Trinkle said.
Service providers “will be able to restrict content and content providers they disagree with or wish to undermine,” he said. “The FCC’s 2015 ruling held that broadband service providers could not block access to legal content, applications, services or harmless devices. The proposed changes wipe out that protection.”
Frontier has said it favors a return to what it called “light touch” net neutrality rules favored by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. A Frontier statement called the 2015 order “a solution in search of a problem” and said it has slowed network investment.
Verizon has posted a video on its YouTube channel in which Craig Stillman, the company’s general counsel, says the FCC “is not talking about killing the net neutrality rules … not we or any other [internet provider] are asking to kill open internet rules.”
Stillman said advocacy groups are stirring people up “with outrageous claims.”
Charter, which merged with TimeWarner in 2016 and operates Spectrum cable and internet services, has said the FCC plan to be acted on this week would “spur investment in and the deployment of the next generation of broadband” and has vowed in a statement it “will not block, throttle or discriminate against lawful content.”
Joink did not respond to a request for comment.