The electronics industry needs net neutrality

The current state of technology debate in America boggles the mind. Instead of discussing the engineering and development challenges involved in moving the USA towards a brighter future of advanced manufacturing, smart cities, and an Internet of Things enabling and empowering everyone with new products and services, we instead find ourselves debating whether or not companies can profit from restricting trade and development. From alternate energy to electric cars, vested legacy business interests are actively restraining American progress to line their pockets.

One area of contention involves data transmission and access to content, otherwise known as the “net neutrality” debate. Until now, the Internet has been an open field, enabling small and large developers alike equal access to create, develop, and deploy their programs, products, and services. From its inception, the ability for anyone with an idea and a means to manifest it and make it available to others has been the reason the Internet has been an exponentially growing marketplace. Now people and organizations that had nothing to do with the success of the Internet want to gate it so they can extract the maximum profit from it.

This regressive effort will stifle the very thing that gave the Internet value in the first place, as an open forum and marketplace of ideas. Gating the web and giving preferential access to it will turn it into another flavor of mass media and restrict further entrepreneurial development. Allowing the “Big Boys” to ride roughshod over the people who created the value of the Web in the first place is shortsighted and detrimental to further exponential development.

The electronics industry should be at the forefront of those who decry this restrictive and defeatist business model. The very success of the Internet of Things and the Smart Grid as fundamental societal infrastructures is dependent on information being treated as a utility as open and accessible as electricity. A gated web is also a web that puts a damper on independent development.  Those fresh new ideas from small startups will dry up, as they fight to reach the customer base they need to get their product or service off the ground.

This extends to every level of our industry. Even large companies will have trouble developing and deploying services as the cost of access goes up, as it will retard risk-taking by making Cloud-based product development and deployment more expensive. In addition, since many of the web’s early-adopter crowd is made up of people exploring and finding those new products and services made available by an unrestricted web, launching anything in a gated web environment will have to involve immediate mainstream adoption. That alone will be the death knell of originality online.

We must choose between an open web, or a “smart-TV’ landscape of mainstream content and services. We play with the golden goose of the Internet at extreme risk, especially since we need the open marketplace an unfettered Internet provides to empower and harness the vital and long-recognized entrepreneurial and inventive energies of the American people.

PSD