Wired: Internet Use During Pandemic Shows Need For Net Neutrality

LOS ANGELES—Claims by opponents of net neutrality that the internet would become overwhelmed during a national crisis have been proven baseless by the net’s performance during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new analysis by Wired Magazine reporter Klint Finley, who has covered the net neutrality controversy for at least the past three years.  Net neutrality rules prohibit “throttling” or slowing of internet traffic from some sites, while favoring others. Though opponents of federal net neutrality rules — which were repealed by the FCC in 2018 — claimed that throttling would become necessary in order to clear the digital lane for important services, such as telemedicine or first-responder information, the internet performance during the pandemic shutdowns contradicts those claims, according to Finley. As stay-at-home orders took effect in March, online traffic surged by up to 40 percent, according to the Wired analysis, an increase driven largely by entertainment services such as Netflix and YouTube as newly home-bound users went online to pass the time and alleviate boredom.  Online video conferencing has exploded by 300 percent, while gaming traffic has jumped 400 percent, according to Wired. Porn traffic is, unsurprisingly, up as well. Pornhub reported an 18 percent spike in early April, according to a report by The Conversation.  But none of these apparently non-essential uses of digital bandwidth have caused slowing of the internet overall — though some video streaming services, including Netflix, have voluntarily limited their own download speeds.  “Data gathered by internet analysis company Ookla shows that any slowing of internet speeds in recent months has been localized, and slight,” Finley wrote, adding that according to that data, overall internet speeds are approximately the same as or faster than speeds recorded in December, 2019, just before the pandemic fears started to take hold.  “Some providers could be struggling more than others and that certain neighborhoods or towns might not hold up as well as others, but on the whole, networks in the US have held up well,” Finley wrote. Though net neutrality opponents have claimed that ditching the rules would lead to increased spending by telecom companies on bandwidth infrastructure, resulting in higher speeds and larger capacity, in fact many big internet service providers including Comcast and AT&T have slashed new investments since the net neutrality rules were repealed on June, 2018.  In fact, Comcast increased spending and upgraded its network in 2015, after the now-repealed rules were implemented. But in reality, the rules “had no impact on telecommunication industry investment levels” during the time that net neutrality was in place, according to a George Washington University study cited by Wired. According to Chintan Patel, a chief technologist with Cisco Systems, the inherent structure of the internet is built specifically to handle peak traffic. “The internet is not just one thing. It’s like a living breathing human with lots of different neurons and connection points working to keep it alive,” he said in a CNBC interview. “Even if you cut off one finger, the rest of the body will keep it alive.” Photo By Lars Nissen / Pixabay