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Internet Neutrality: Ethical Issues in the Internet Environment

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Abstract

This paper investigates the ethical issues surrounding the concept of Internet neutrality focusing specifically on the correlation between neutrality and fairness. Moving from an analysis of the many available definitions of Internet neutrality and the heterogeneity of the Internet infrastructure, the common assumption that a neutral Internet is also a fair Internet is challenged. It is argued that a properly neutral Internet supports undesirable situations in which few users can exhaust the majority of the available resources or in which specific types of applications and services cannot be developed or properly deployed. The solution offered to these shortcomings is based on (1) an environmental approach to the Internet, (2) the four guiding principles of Floridi’s Information Ethics and (3) a principle called ‘Information Diversity’. The paper is divided into six sections. Section 1 briefly presents the debate concerning the concepts of network and Internet neutrality. Section 2 poses a general and unifying definition of Internet neutrality based on the critical assessment of several domain-specific approaches to the problem of neutrality. Section 3 is dedicated to the analysis of the relationship between Internet neutrality and the ethical principle of fairness. Section 4 introduces Floridi’s Information Ethics, the definition of Information Diversity and an analysis of how they can be used to address the limitations of Internet neutrality. Section 5 summarises the ethics of Internet neutrality and Information Diversity defining their relationship. Section 6 reviews the arguments presented in the paper clarifying the foundational role played by Information Diversity and Information Ethics in Internet policy-making activity.

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Notes

  1. Internet Non Discrimination Act S. 2360 (2006), Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act H.R. 5252 (2006), Network Neutrality Act of 2006 (H.R. 5273), Communications, Consumer’s Choice and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (S. 2686), Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006 (H.R. 5417), Internet Freedom Preservation Act (S. 215 in the 110th Congress, formerly S. 2917 (109th Congress), Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 (H.R.5353) and The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 3458).

  2. See: European Parliament, Regulation (EC) no 1211/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2009 establishing the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) and the Office (2009).

  3. For example, Peha (2007) maintains that: “This paper argues that the debate should shift towards the complex details of differentiating harmful discrimination from beneficial discrimination, and away from high-level secondary questions like whether discrimination is inherently just, how important general design principles are, what abstract rights and freedoms consumers and carriers deserve.”

  4. http://www.savetheinternet.com/

  5. http://www.ups.com

  6. For reasons of clarity and consistency, from now on the term ‘Internet neutrality’ will be used to indicate the debate concerning the neutrality of the Internet. The term ‘Internet neutrality’ will be adopted also when referring to authors that have used the term ‘network neutrality’.

  7. Table 1 may be extended to obtain a more detailed description of the Internet infrastructure. For example, the logical layer of Table 1 could be specified following the four layers of the TCP/IP model (Braden 1989b, 1989a) or the seven layers of the OSI Reference Model (ITU-T 1994) while the user layer could be differentiated into multiple typologies of end-users and/or service providers. Nonetheless, the details offered in Table 1 are sufficient to outline the multiple levels at which Internet neutrality has been defined.

  8. The loaded term ‘discrimination’ can be used here without confusion as it is part of an ethical argument involving the general concept of fairness. As seen in Section 2, the term ‘differentiation’ should be used in a non-ethical context.

  9. Note that it is commonly accepted that the ‘end-to-end’ design principle on which Internet neutrality is often grounded (see for example, Lessig 2007) can be overlooked for performance reasons (Blumenthal and Clark 2001). While it is usually more efficient to implement the communication intelligence in the end points, in some conditions it might be desirable to implement this at the routing level. This means that the end-to-end design principle is relative to performance considerations and is not something that ought to be implemented dogmatically. The same should apply to Internet neutrality.

  10. Note the P2P is here adopted as an example of a type of application architecture that uses a large amount of available bandwidth potentially degrading the overall performance of the data network. Any application that has this characteristic can be used in the given example instead of P2P. VOIP, multimedia streaming are all examples of applications that in some conditions can degrade the overall performance of a data network. Furthermore, there is no intention to criminalise P2P applications and no inference or distinction about the users of such applications is drawn. For an analysis of the ethical implications of the P2P, specifically for what concerns an environmental ethical perspective, see Taddeo and Vaccaro (2011).

  11. http://www.facebook.com/

  12. http://www.myspace.com/

  13. http://twitter.com/

  14. Consider for example the difficulties faced by providers wanting to serve real-time, high definition multimedia content. The limitations imposed by a neutral Internet slow down the development of suitable applications and, as a consequence, the growth of a potentially large market. Similar problems are faced by any other application with comparable requirements such as VOIP or P2P applications.

  15. A parallel issue is whether some services like audio/video conferencing, multimedia streaming or gaming should use the Internet at all. The process of shifting services from independent and dedicated platforms to the Internet is relevant from an environmental perspective, especially when considering that the Internet offers a limited amount of resources and cannot expand boundlessly. Information Ethics offers a normative framework that can be taken into account when developing specific policies about resource allocation.

  16. http://www.skype.com/

  17. Please remember that accessibility, shareability and usability are all rewritable principles in case, for example, of privacy, anonymity or confidentiality requirements.

  18. Note that no assumption is made about the possibility to choose other ethical frameworks for the same purpose. Information Ethics has been chosen here because it is consistent with the assumptions made about the Internet as an informational environment. The peculiar characteristic of Information Ethics is not that of offering original evaluation criteria – it is, after all, inspired by the environmental approach of medical ethics – but that of grounding such criteria on an ontological theory of information.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper has been presented at CEPE09, Corfu, Greece. We are very grateful for all the valuable comments and useful suggestions offered by the conference attendees. The authors would like also to thank the three referees chosen by the editorial board of the journal ‘Philosophy and Technology’. Their comments were insightful and sincerely aimed at further developing our paper. They are responsible only for the improvements, not for any remaining mistakes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Matteo Turilli

  2. Information Ethics Group, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Matteo Turilli & Mariarosaria Taddeo

  3. IESE Business School, Barcelona, Madrid, Spain

    Antonino Vaccaro

  4. Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK

    Mariarosaria Taddeo

  5. Uehiro Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Mariarosaria Taddeo

Authors
  1. Matteo Turilli
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  2. Antonino Vaccaro
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  3. Mariarosaria Taddeo
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Correspondence to Matteo Turilli.

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Turilli, M., Vaccaro, A. & Taddeo, M. Internet Neutrality: Ethical Issues in the Internet Environment. Philos. Technol. 25, 133–151 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0039-2

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