Mexico. Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has introduced a proposal to eliminate Net Neutrality in the United States.
Net Neutrality is defined as the principle by which internet service providers should treat all data traffic equally, without any discrimination.
Since its coinage in 2003, the term went from being a purely academic concept that led to the publication, in 2011, of the so-called open internet order by the FCC.
This ordinance obliges Internet providers to treat the traffic that runs through their networks equally, that is, it prohibits them from both slowing down and prioritizing any type of traffic and under no circumstances.
But what would be wrong with net neutrality being eliminated or maintained?
On the one hand, broadly speaking, those who favor net neutrality explain that if discrimination of content is allowed, it will incubate a barrier to entry to new applicants so that in the future we could stop seeing companies like Google or Facebook, which began in a garage at home and that in theory thanks to the non-discrimination of content, they were able to make their way to become what they are today.
On the other hand, those who ask for its elimination argue that those companies that own the infrastructure, and through which the contents transit, are receiving a lot of pressure in their networks due to the high internet consumption that users are doing, therefore, require greater amounts of investment to be able to expand and improve the networks.
It is important to mention that Pai, in his proposal, mentions that the internet would not be left to its fate, but that by eliminating it would be changing from a scheme in which no discrimination is allowed to another in which discrimination is allowed, at the same time that the FCC would supervise only those cases in which it is found that there are anti-competitive practices.
It is true that the internet is not the same as that of 2011 when this measure was established, we are currently making a more intensive use of the internet, so much so that Cisco calculates that by 2021 80 percent of the total traffic on the Internet will be only video.
As an economist I think that, if we analyze the internet as another market, it does not sound unreasonable that you can discriminate for certain content. The same has happened in other infrastructures such as in the mail in which companies such as DHL and FedEx appeared and that is not why traditional mail ceased to exist, on the contrary, it even improved.
We must be aware of what the FCC's definition will be, since, if many regulatory bodies were to be eliminated, they would have to start rethinking their current neutrality policies.
Text written by Gonzalo Rojon of The Competitive Intelligence Unit S.C.
