Why enterprises should care more about net neutrality

Net neutrality is a topic that arouses nearly as many people as politics does, in no small part because it’s been a political issue. But nearly all of that emotion is at the consumer level. CIOs and network operations and planning professionals cite the topic as important in less than 5% of cases. Are they right? I don’t think so.

Starting in the 1990s, the Internet has transformed networking at every level. As broad IP services to consumers grew, network operators used IP infrastructure to offer IP VPN services to business, which gradually replaced much of the old time-division-multiplexed digital trunks. It’s fair to say that most enterprises today are using data services created by the Internet, and that alone should demonstrate that Internet policy has had, and will continue to have, a major impact on business services. In fact, several.

The most obvious impact is that neutrality policy has been aimed at encouraging over-the-top services, by encouraging competition. The “no discrimination against lawful content” is the single most common element in any regulations on the Internet or Internet access. This prevents giants in the OTT space from striking sweetheart deals with Internet providers at the expense of new players. This rule, though, has been broadened to prevent subtle anti-competitive behavior, and while many companies have benefited from the open Internet that neutrality policies have created, they’ve also been impacted by this subtle broadening of rules.

The most subtle impact is created by the “bill and keep” model of the Internet. Prior to the Internet, it was normal practice for multiple operators who participated in a service to divide the payment made by the user, a process called “settlement.” The Internet approach does away with service-specific settlement, which makes it difficult to control the QoS of a service across providers because only the consumer’s own ISP is paid. Lack of settlement is often cited as a major barrier, and at some points in the evolution of net neutrality policies, bill and keep has been explicitly required.

A less-subtle neutrality point has an even more direct impact on QoS. “Paid prioritization” of traffic, meaning allowing a user to pay for special handling, is almost always barred by net neutrality rules. This rule alone, in many countries, makes it almost impossible for network operators to sell any form of premium service. Add that to the lack of settlement and it’s easy to see why end-to-end QoS isn’t available on the Internet.

For network operators, these two neutrality-related points have closed off a potentially critical path to sustaining revenues and profits. QoS guarantees are a potential premium feature, and one that operators could charge for. In fact, QoS guarantees may be the only such feature that a significant number of Internet users recognize as valuable. In countries where net neutrality constrains premium handling, operators tell me that there is simply no way for the operator to impact user experience (UX), so selling the capability is impossible and operator impotence in this area devalues them to Internet users.

OK, but why should enterprises care? Let me count the ways.

1. Lack of Internet QoS makes inexpensive consumer-Internet infrastructure less useful to businesses as an access technology for remote sites and work-from-home sites. Of 447 enterprises who commented on remote site access, 422 said that lack of premium handling options for the Internet was one of the top two reasons for staying with more expensive options, like Ethernet.
2. Some business communications missions, especially those related to IoT or real-time applications, would benefit from or even require premium handling, particularly low packet loss and latency. Without it, these applications have to be supported through local compute resources, resources out in the wild where they’re more expensive to support.
3. Lack of a way to improve the profitability of consumer Internet access services leads to increased profit pressure on operators overall. Their only option besides subsidization is to increase prices on business services. Businesses note that they already pay “ten times or more” as much for capacity, and price increases can threaten the business case and ROI on applications companies already depend on, not to mention making it more difficult to launch new applications.
4. Neutrality policies, in the words of one big multinational, “blow in the political wind” in nearly every market, and those winds usually blow in different directions for each regulatory jurisdiction. The result is a haze of uncertainty about policies that lead to network planners’ hunkering down on the most restrictive possible outcomes anywhere they need service. “We have a five-year capital cycle for network gear,” one enterprise said. “We can’t easily accommodate policy changes every couple of years.”
5. Financial pressure leads to potentially radical changes in the network operator space, including M&A, service and service pricing changes, even changes in support policies and service coverage. All of this creates a risk to an enterprise, and one with a large market footprint may face more changes than planning can readily accommodate. One enterprise in a large and dispersed market has already had to engage three alternative access providers so far in 2024.

How enterprises can deal with these five factors, and perhaps additional ones that crop up as policies shift, is a problem in itself. Tracking regulatory policy in a dozen or more jurisdictions is simply too difficult for enterprises to undertake, and only 43 of the enterprises found any “satisfactory” third-party firm to do the job for them at a reasonable price. But 72 said they started by gaining contact with the regulatory affairs group of each of their operators. These people have a vested interest in regulatory engagement, and often a specific mandate to sustain an active relationship.

Almost all of these 72 enterprises use a small (one to three people) “watchdog staff” to engage with operators’ regulatory affairs teams and digest the trends for dissemination to planners and key managers/executives. So far, every one of them says the process satisfies their planning needs, which is a contrast to those using third-party firms, only half of which are similarly beneficial.

These enterprises also suggest that the sales teams in each regulatory jurisdiction be aware of local news regarding net neutrality and feed these developments back to the enterprise regulatory watchdog staff. News items can then be an indicator to look into and summarize any developments for dissemination within the enterprise. Enterprises that are themselves regulated may find their own regulatory contacts a useful source of local neutrality news, even though telecommunications policy is likely not handled by the same contacts.

Enterprises generally believe that lobbying for a given neutrality policy is unlikely to be helpful, but they agree that feeding back concerns through the regulatory affairs people of their network operators may help those operators set and communicate their own policies. That, in turn, could help business service users.

Internet policy impacts an enterprise’s increasingly critical relationship with prospects, customers, suppliers, partners, and even their own workers. It also impacts the business data service choices available, and the price and capability of each. Net neutrality policies are the single most significant regulatory influence on the Internet and data services, so while they’re politics and therefore messy and frustrating, you need to care about them and work hard to see where they’ll take your network.