Instituting internet tolls is a mistaken policy in the search for diversity of access, write Konstantinos Komaitis and Fabro Steibel

In 2018, Burger King released an ad to explain what would happen if net neutrality was abandoned. In the ad, customers discover that to eat now they must pay 3 times the price of a normal hamburger, or pay the usual amount, and get in a long, time-consuming queue for the same hamburger. The ad was broadcast in the United States, and became known as “Whopper Neutrality”. In practice, what was done there was to explain to laypeople why we defend net neutrality on the Internet.

At the moment, in Europe, Brazil and many other countries, large telecommunications companies, big telcos, are lobbying governments to implement “internet tolls”. This would be an amount paid by the private sector, not to the State, but directly to the big telcos, with the intention of bringing internet to those who do not yet have it. But there are problems with the argument, and to stop misinformation from spreading (or to promote information integrity, in the words of the G20), we need to translate this for the average citizen.

Firstly, it is good to contextualize that big telcos claim to have to pay for the internet infrastructure themselves, which is not true. The connection cost is distributed across a complex network of national and foreign actors. From websites and apps to small providers, from computers near your home to submarine cable in Japan, the cost of the internet is spread across many parts.

It is precisely this ecosystem, based on free competition and voluntary agreements, that allows data traffic to become more accessible, year after year. The implementation of a toll on the network could unbalance this ecosystem and harm its functioning.

Secondly, telecommunications companies argue that South Korea experimented with the toll and that everything went well there. It’s not what it appears from a technical perspective.

Several authors demonstrate, using different methodologies, that connection costs have increased in Korea, and that applications have left the country because of this high cost. Right there, which has one of the best networks in the world, the internet has become less accessible and diverse, due to network toll policies.

A 3rd point: big telcos argue that net neutrality favors North American mega technology companies. This is a fallacy. The principle of net neutrality makes digital markets less (not more) concentrated. It’s because? Because we have lowered connection costs, hardware costs, research costs, and many others. The lower the cost of using the internet, the more accessible it will be for market entrants. And having new entrants means fighting market concentration.

The idea of ​​establishing a toll on the internet is old. It started there in 2012, was rejected by all countries at the time, and reappeared in 2021. First, in Europe; later, in Brazil. The big telcos lobby asks governments to hold public consultations to discuss the idea. This has been done, and as the Internet Society says, the result is clear. In Europe or here, this is a policy that polarizes between big telcos and the rest of the world.

And it’s worth remembering that producing revenue for big telcos to connect the unconnected is a bottomless pit. We have decades of learning to say that without supervision and collection, where profit is uncertain, connectivity takes time.

As in the example of “Whopper Neutrality”, the premise of network neutrality is that no network will be more important than another, and that the more connected actors we have, the better the network will be for everyone (including big telcos).

We need to remember: the majority of disconnected people live in urban areas, have primary education and self-declare as black or mixed race. And we know that in deep Brazil, like on the Amazon River, the internet is arriving via satellite, provided by foreign companies.

The risk of misinformation about net neutrality is that it appears that the principle is dated and unnecessary. I’m mistaken: it’s never been more necessary. And knowing this, what can we do? Ask governments, which open consultations on the topic, to present risk and impact analysis, and to seek evidence on the impact on consumers (and connectivity).

We urgently need to connect the disconnected, but the wrong direction is to make the internet more expensive and slower, instituting an internet toll that benefits the few (and harms the many).

Via: Poder 360