In the day-to-day operations of running a successful online commerce business, it is easy to get exhausted putting out brush fires.
Daily e-Commerce Brush Fires
• Drop-shipping SNAFUs
• Catching a free-fall in your conversion-to-sale rates
• Cost-per-click keyword bids that jump and take your Click-through Charges with them
• That stuck feeling when you learn your purchase of last-season Girl’s Accessories just hit the “No Way” list at Crunch.com
• Burning up your planned paid-ad budget for three months in only 30 days
• Learning about the toy safety recall after your lot cleared imports
Sometimes it’s challenges we can’t see clearly through the thick layer of smoke on the daily horizon that pose the greatest threats to our ROI, profitability and business survival. The issue of Net Neutrality is one of those distant fires. Let’s clear some smoke.
Net Neutrality in a Nutshell
A threat to online commerce is from the opposite of Net Neutrality: A planned system of restrictive tollbooths on the information superhighway. These non-neutral Internet tollbooths will control access, speed limits and road conditions to all big-bandwidth packet streams (your content) by travelers (your dealers or customers with searches and purchase transactions) idling at their browsers while backed up at Internet on-ramps.
We all know that the “free” Internet has a planet-sized backbone and access control points, such as Internet Service Providers and national domain filters. (The latter includes censorship policies placed on Google, Yahoo! and other search providers for results allowed to China’s 100 million Internet users. Also, Yahoo! is being questioned by the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee for its possible role in arrest of a Chinese journalist who sent an email criticizing Chinese media restrictions.
Aside from official censorship roadblocks, anyone with ISP Internet access anywhere can use the superhighway and go where they like.
Enter the tele-communications lobby. Long-term plans were to set up tiers of commercial service on the information superhighway, charging content providers and web destinations extra for the privilege of a big, wide, high-speed road on which their potential customers or readers reach them.
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The I-road narrows, clogs and gets bumper-to-bumpier for users trying to reach non-paying destinations, like smaller e-Commerce sites, start-ups, news and opinion sites and non-profits. Once you’re on the toll-free roads — Internet roads where smaller, lower-revenue businesses live and won’t pay extra to ISP networks — then you’re off the maps of tollbooth operators like AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner or Comcast. Customers may still reach your virtual storefront, but they will have stalled and hit potholes before crossing your digital threshold.
This old dog wears a new digital collar: In 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a telegraph company is a “common carrier” and obligated to provide non-discriminatory service to anyone who asks. Today’s Internet version of common carriage is Net Neutrality.
What’s In Net Neutrality for You?
This payment for special treatment (not being slowed or blocked) would be called “paying the vig” in a TV episode of The Sopranos. The telecom lobby calls it the “cost of doing business” or “the price of heavier data demands on networks.” What the National Cable & Telecommunications Association counted on is people not paying attention because the issue is “too complex.”
Apologies to readers who find the above too simplistic. For details, go to Net Neutrality sites at Common Cause < www.commoncause.org/NetNeutrality/ > and Save the Internet < www.savetheinternet.com/=faq >. For the other side, check NCTA’s site at
< www.ncta.com/IssueBrief.aspx?contentId=2715 > . Detail wonks can check “Broadband Internet Regulation and Access” at < www.ncta.com/IssueBrief.aspx?contentId=2715 > . Detail wonks can check “Broadband Internet Regulation and Access” at < www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22444.pdf >.
One thing online commerce free enterprisers can do is support Net Neutrality, especially to their U.S. senators. Legislation to make the FCC enforce Net Neutrality failed in both houses in 2006, in a vote that fell along party lines. However, advocates in the Senate left open voting on a bigger telecom bill; and largely anti-Net Neutrality Republicans lost control of Congress in November 2006. The vote is coming back.
Congress hears from lobbyists on why commercial Internet tollbooths are needed.
Congress also needs to hear from e-Commerce entrepreneurs who don’t have deep pockets or revenues of an eBay, Google or Fortune 1000 company. They need to hear from marketers like you; that is, once you stomp out that daily brush fire.