Perhaps unusually for a networked world, Barack Obama’s statement supporting net neutrality will have little immediate effect outside the United States.
The debate concerns the way the internet is delivered to homes and offices: proponents of net neutrality argue that the fee internet users pay to get online should cover access to any site, no matter how popular it is; opposing them are the major US internet service providers such as Verizon and Comcast, who want the ability to charge sites that hog bandwidth extra, above and beyond the fees their visitors pay for access in the first place.
Other jurisdictions have their own debates about net neutrality. In the UK, for example, 10 of the biggest ISPs voluntarily signed up in 2012 to a code that held them to offering open and full access to the net, and not prioritising traffic to their own products. But few ISPs outside the US have been as aggressively opposed to net neutrality as the likes of Verizon, which issued a legal challenge in 2013 to rules requiring it to treat net traffic equally.
Obama’s statement, which asks the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to implement rules banning blocking, throttling or paid prioritisation online, could prove to be an important precedent for the rest of the world. The president said broadband service was “of the same importance, and must carry the same obligations” as services such as the telephone network, and asked the FCC to classify it as such. For proponents of net neutrality in Britain and elsewhere, having such a powerful supporter to point to is important.
It also bolsters the case for considering internet access as a right that should be safeguarded by government, something suggested by Britain’s Labour Digital group, which proposed that “government should assess the viability of providing free basic internet access to all citizens, possibly as a requirement for participation in 5G auctions, or targeted at children eligible for free school meals”.
More than that, it also helps ensure a future for the internet that is as open to new ideas as it always has been. The internet has “created enormous value … fuelled economic growth, and made [American] internet companies global leaders,” said a joint letter from more than 150 firms including Amazon, Microsoft and Google in May. They feared that an end to net neutrality would allow existing players to simply pay for better service, beating startups with their wallets rather than their ideas.