Net Neutrality and News
More Americans are getting their news online than through newspapers, but Internet free speech advocacy groups say the communications companies could influence what news content is easily available to the average user on the Web.
A December 2008 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that 40 percent of those surveyed get most of their national and international news online, nearly double last year's levels. Only 35 percent reported getting most of their news from a newspaper.
However, several major communications companies have created controversy by limiting users' access to certain parts of the Internet, which some advocacy groups say is a danger to a free flow of information on the Web.
How A Non-Neutral Network Could Affect News
Speeding up or slowing down certain kinds of content would be a problem for local newspapers and TV stations which don't have the financial resources to partner with a large service provider to gain a speed advantage required to better provide its users with video, audio, photos and interactive content, said Adam Lynn, policy director for Free Press, a media rights advocacy group.
He said the larger Internet service providers (ISPs) want to act as gatekeepers by finding new ways to make revenue from how they deliver content. Speeding up content from companies they have partnerships with is one option, but this can be cost-prohibitive to small, local news outlets.
Groups like Free Press, which sponsors the Web site Save The Internet, and Public Knowledge, a digital rights group, say that Internet service providers could unbalance the playing field of the Internet by choosing which content to speed up or slow down on its networks. This would depend on the partnership between the Internet service providers and the individual Web sites.
Small news outlets would suffer in this situation, Lynn said. The disconnect between the large amount of competition in the news market and the lack of competition in the ISP market makes it hard for new companies to get started. Because users require bandwidth to download content, and the standards of success for a Web site are the amount of people visiting the site and how long they stay, the amount of bandwidth factors into a news site's success in keeping viewers engaged.
Lynn said “it's pretty disturbing” that the only option small companies would have to provide viewers with large amounts of bandwidth and high speed access to their content is to partner with a large ISP.
How AT&T handles its public access, educational, and government channels in its U-verse service is another example of how news on the Internet could be without net neutrality, said Art Brodsky, communications director for Public Knowledge. AT&T's U-verse service combines TV, voice, and Web data and transmits it all through an Internet connection, according to its Web site (pdf). The service requires users to navigate a time-consuming menu to watch the channels, and the channels are not recordable on the service's Digital Video Recorder or available on the service's on-screen programming guide, according to a filing (pdf) with the Federal Communications Commission. The ability of telecommunications companies to slow down, stop or organize bits of data on their networks would allow them to do the same thing with any Internet content, Brodsky suggested, including news sites.
Net Neutrality Cases
The controversy about the access to news on the Internet is closely connected to the concept of net neutrality, which is the belief that the Internet should be a neutral playing field that allows all users access to all content on its networks, regardless of source, destination or provider.
In November 2007, Free Press and Public Knowledge filed a complaint (pdf) with the Federal Communications Commission against cable company Comcast, which they say was slowing down access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, especially the program BitTorrent. In July 2008, the FCC ordered the company to stop slowing down users' access to the program.
There are currently no laws that protect net neutrality, but the FCC has a policy statement (pdf) that says users of the Internet are “entitled” to access content of their choice, run applications and use services of their choice, connect devices that don't harm the Internet and are entitled to competition among network, service and content providers. The FCC has said it will enforce its policies, and the Comcast decision was the first example of the Commission's action on its policy statement.
Influence over bandwidth and access by ISPs continues. Cox Communications began testing a system in February in Kansas and Arkansas to give time-sensitive material, like "web pages, voice calls, streaming videos and gaming," precedence on their networks, according to its Congestion Management FAQs Web site.
Graphic by James Robertson
