With the FCC putting Net Neutrality regulation to vote tomorrow it seems like a fairly good time to unveil some recent news stories that articulate the issue and CrunchGear has one. Allot and Opennet, some sort of communications carriers it seems, have posted a presentation about how to monetize networks based on specific traffic and offer technology solutions for identifying traffic content to allow carriers to identify, schedule, throttle, or block traffic (or content) as they desire. This covers exactly the fears of those citing pro-net neutrality arguments:

Allot and Openet use multiple methods to figure out what you’re looking at including “methods like heuristic analysis, behavioral and historical analysis, deep packet inspection, and a number of other techniques.”

What’s key is that we have the best application identification available on the market, which means that even applications that are encrypted or use other methods to evade detection will be correctly identified and classified… We essentially feed this real-time information about traffic and application usage into the policy and charging system. Each subscriber has a particular service plan that they sign up for, and they’re as generic or as personalized as the operator wants.

In short, this is the ultimate example for pro-net neutrality legislation. The entire service stinks to high heaven and the key words in that quote above (“as personalized as the operator wants”) personifies the problem with an anti-NN stance: once the operators decide what they want, you’re out in the cold. Maybe the operator doesn’t want to deal with Wikileaks – bam, no support. Maybe the operator wants to support Bing for commercial purposes – bang, no Google. It’s a slippery slope and we’re already at the top of the slide.

In many philosophical arguments, slippery slope is very difficult to make convincing as the person making the claim must show how each step must inevitably lead to the next. While it’s not doubtful that tiered networks such as the above would emerge without the presence of net neutrality regulation, opponents of neutrality regulation argue that this is an expectation of the open market. As long as customers still have the freedom to choose between multiple networks they will end up choosing those who don’t screw with their traffic over networks that do and charge too much for it.

Although, in the absence of net neutrality regulation, it might require other regulatory principles that prevent carriers from counter-competitive behaviors that will lead to fiber and content network monopolies (as mentioned above) or outright censorship that affects multiple downstream networks that might otherwise not have signed up for.

While various advocates for net neutrality continue to spar over the details of what it even means, and against components of the industry itself which doesn’t want regulatory language legislated against it, we’ll continue to see more fears such as this arise as arguments. This may become especially so as the FCC votes on rules about Internet net neutrality regulation tomorrow. If the vote does turn towards the FCC taking up those reigns, though, expect the next steps in the United States Congress to involve deciding if the FCC itself has the authority to regulate the Internet.