Many of the 1.5m rural British households who can't get broadband internet access are hoping for great things from Britain's digital minister, Stephen Carter. Carter's Digital Britain review, due to be published this summer, includes plans to help provide internet access at speeds of up to 2Mb/s to every British home. (2Mb/s is roughly fast enough to stream programmes from the BBC's iPlayer).
But behind these proposals lies a potentially troubling idea: in exchange for fresh investment in digital infrastructure, telecom companies could be allowed to tighten their control over how the internet is used, and what gets distributed over it. On 10th March Carter, a former adviser to Gordon Brown, was grilled by MPs over his plans for "net neutrality"—the principle that the internet should be equally accessible for all users and services. "What you are proposing," a parliamentary committee chief said, "seems to alter the philosophy of the internet, which is that it has been controlled by its users." Carter replied: "My own view is that that is changing."
As the former boss of communications regulator Ofcom, Carter has spent much of the last year trying to bring together what he calls "the pipes and the poetry" of communications policy. He's trying to broker a long-term deal for the huge investment—estimated at between £5bn and £29bn—needed for the next phase of Britain's internet development. Universal access is just one part; the bigger prize is a new generation of broadband infrastructure, tens or even hundreds of times faster than today's connections.
To find out how such a deal might work, business leaders and policy people packed into a "digital summit" in London on 16th April, attended by Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and even Steven Fry. There Carter explained his plan for a new deal bringing together the internet's two big commercial blocs: companies that control content (the poetry), and those that run networks (the pipes). At stake is not just who provides broadband—but who controls the future of the internet itself.
Much of the last two decades of internet development has been built on networks made from copper telephone wires, laid by the old Post Office and cleverly tweaked to carry internet traffic. But this network is starting to creak. Carter wants money to upgrade it, which (in a recession) means finding ways to encourage cash-strapped telecommunications companies to invest. The sticking point between the poets and the plumbers is over who should pay.
This impasse exists, in part, because the current business model for investment in internet infrastructure doesn't work. Many internet businesses make money, but few share the cost of putting pipes in the ground. Carter wants a new framework in which money trickles back to those who pay to build the networks in the first place.
Some parts of his plan will help content producers, most obviously through a promised crackdown on pirates who break copyright. Others will try to fix public service broadcasting, in part so that big players like the BBC and Channel 4 can keep making popular digital services, like the iPlayer. But most controversially, in the name of faster investment, Carter looks willing to sacrifice the idea of net neutrality itself. In its place, he envisages a world where network providers, like BT or Virgin, are free to try to make more money by striking preferential deals with those who want to deliver content or services to their customers.
How might this work? Few users know that their internet service provider (ISP) can already operate a "traffic management" policy: making your downloads faster or slower. Today, if you use an application like the internet telephone service Skype, or download a music video, a slow connection is usually just a glitch. In Carter's imagined future, however, network companies could deliberately slow down all video or telephone services, except for those it had a special deal with.
If Carter doesn't rule out such practices they may become much more common. And while richer consumers will still be able to pay for access that is fast and free, poorer, less informed users may find themselves corralled into cheap and cheerful corporate internets, where fast access would be offset by intrusive advertising or a narrower range of "approved" services.
Certainly, the commercial appetite for such steps will only get stronger as the likes of BT contemplate big losses and painful redundancies. In early May, Rupert Murdoch suggested that he wanted to start charging for access to more of his newspapers online, and the recession means that other businesses are just as keen to squeeze more money from the content they produce and the networks they own. Ofcom, meanwhile, thinks anyone who doesn't like an ISP's traffic management policies can just switch providers.
Even so, an end to net neutrality should worry us because it will limit both competition and citizens' ability to access freely the internet's treasure trove. Openness doesn't just guarantee free speech, it also partly explains recent unprecedented levels of innovation. After all, YouTube, Facebook and eBay did not have to strike a deal with BT or Verizon before launching.
Some of the criticism of Carter is overblown; someone, after all, has to pay for all this investment, while he has a point that a faster, more reliable internet will make public services and businesses more efficient. Yet looking closely at Carter's deal, it is possible that his solution is worse than the problem. Should Britain be aiming for an internet that is slower but freer, or one that is faster but fettered? At Carter's current pace the question could be all but answered this autumn, in a backroom pact between a government with an eye on its election pledges and a businesses community desperate to improve its bottom lines.
