Columbia Law Professor and author of Who Controls the Internet and The Master Switch Tim Wu coined the term “net neutrality” in 2003.

In an exclusive phone interview with The Winged Post, Wu defined net neutrality as “the principle that when you request something on the Internet you get what you ask for, as opposed to whether it gets interfered with.”

Net neutrality enables all content on the Internet to get to you, the end user, at the same speed. Proponents of net neutrality argue that without it, large corporations would be able to purchase priority from ISPs (like Verizon), therefore stifling startups or small businesses unable to pay for extra treatment.

“The Internet is the utility of our current existence. People, businesses, everyone expects to get what they want when they ask for it,” Wu said. “So in order for the country to grow, and for people to be able to connect with each other, I think it’s very important to have principles of net neutrality. What the [cable companies] want to do is create a toll booth. They want to be able to charge Google to reach you; net neutrality stops them from charging people.”

Wu has raised the question of whether eBay, Google, Skype or any other once-small startup, dwarfed by large corporations of the time, would have been able to flourish in the absence of net neutrality.

Brian Bieron, currently the Executive Director of the eBay Inc. Public Policy Lab, shared the company’s viewpoint on net neutrality in a phone interview with The Winged Post. Bieron led eBay’s US Government Relations Team in Washington, D.C., which dealt with issues such as net neutrality, from 2004 to 2012.

“We believe that the global open Internet is critical for entrepreneurship, economic growth, and we believe the fact that the Internet does not have gatekeepers is one of the reasons that it’s such a powerful, global tool,” Bieron said. “The Internet is so powerful and so great because all these networks, all over the world, all connect to each other. Essentially, anybody anywhere can communicate with anybody anywhere, in a way that has never been possible before.”

Bieron shared eBay’s concern about the potentially detrimental effect of Internet regulation by ISPs.

“We are concerned about the effect on the users of our various services all around the world. The Internet allows somebody in California to list an item to sell, and some person in France might see it and might decide they want to buy that item,” he said. “All of the sending of information back and forth may travel across four or five different networks. The idea that each of those individual networks would have an ability to slow down the data, or effectively charge somebody extra money for the data to travel over that Internet, would be a negative.”

Charter Communications, which recently lost the bid to acquire Time Warner Cable to Comcast, is a prominent player in the cable business. A former executive from Charter shared his insights with The Winged Post into the perspective of the cable companies regarding network neutrality. John Molise was the Senior Director of Operations Strategy at the company until 2008.

“The bottom line is, cable companies carry large debt burdens and/or an equity structure that is derived from the fact that they had to raise large amounts of capital to build their networks,” Molise said. “It is inconsistent to think that any industry, including cable, will invest the capital required to deliver these rich services and then have all of the revenue and value go to content providers, who sit on the opposite side of the delivery network from the consumer.”

Critics of net neutrality argue that it prevents infrastructure enhancement and impedes innovation in the cable and telecommunications industry. The former director also shed light on cable companies’ recent forays into the content creation business.

“Cable companies are beginning to develop more original content than they did in the past. I would bet that Comcast Sportsnet has almost as much local viewership as ESPN, and Comcast does not have to pay programming fees,” Molise noted. “Instead, Comcast had to invest in the infrastructure, production facilities, cameras, people, et cetera, to generate the content, and over time this will pay a higher return on investment compared with buying ESPN content and passing it along to consumers at a thin margin.”

Some argue these ventures by the distribution industry into the content creation business will result in the degradation of the delivery of third party content.

“I don’t think corporations should have the power to block or inhibit other websites for consumers,” Rishabh Chandra (10) said. “The Internet’s not something that should be corporatized like that; I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

Both Comcast and Verizon declined to comment for an interview with and responded with official press statements.

Comcast, a major player in the cable industry, is bound to an F.C.C. neutrality condition which expires in 2018. On Feb. 19, F.C.C. chairman Tom Wheeler announced that the agency will take steps towards “preserv[ing] a free and open Internet.” In the meantime, keep watching YouTube. You won’t be paying extra anytime soon.

Featured photo: Shay Lari-Hosain

This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on March 12, 2014.