Classroom Companion: Business

21.4
 Business Implications of Net Neutrality
The business implications of net neutrality are significant. With net neutrality in 
force, ISPs cannot discriminate data from over-the-top (OTT) providers—e.g., 
Netflix, Skype, and WhatsApp—to curb competition with their own equivalent 
services. Net neutrality works as a barrier and strengthen the division between the 
business domains of the ISP and the ASP. The ISP has less—if any—opportunities 
to enter the business domain of the ASP if net neutrality is enforced. For reasons 
explained in 
7
Chap. 
4
, full net neutrality divides the business domains of the ISP 
and the ASP in such a way that the ISP becomes the transporter of bits—a com-
modity—and the ASP becomes the provider of the services that uses these bits in 
its service design. This means that the ASP builds its business on the bit- 
transportation capabilities provided by the ISP and no other features of the net-
work. Therefore, net neutrality has consequences for the business of the ISP since 
the ISP is reduced to a commodity and cannot enter the—sometimes lucrative—
business domain of the ASP. This is one of the reasons why many major ISPs 
21.4 · Business Implications of Net Neutrality

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21
oppose net neutrality. The 5G technology and other broadband Internet access 
technologies may alter this picture as described in 
7
Sect. 
21.2
.
The ASP may sometimes be willing to pay the ISP extra for caching parts of 
their content material closer to the consumer. This may be regarded as advanced 
network management to increase the quality of the ASP service. In this case, cer-
tain types of traffic are given priority over other types of traffic but without dis-
criminating traffic belonging to the same type of service. This can be seen as a 
“mild” violation of net neutrality. 5G mobile systems are planned to exploit these 
capabilities to reduce latency and traffic load in Internet of Things applications by 
providing storage and processing capabilities at the radio interface (edge comput-
ing) (Shaw, 
2019
).
The Internet was originally designed as a “dumb pipe” or “dumb network” only 
capable of forwarding IP packets. David Isenberg denoted the Internet the “stupid 
network” interconnecting intelligent terminals in contrast to the “intelligent net-
work” interconnecting stupid terminals in the telephone network (Isenberg, 
1997
). 
There is no “intelligence” or functionalities built into the IP network apart from 
those required for routing IP packets hop-by-hop from the sender to the receiver. 
Management and control functionalities are limited to keeping updated routing 
tables in the IP routers. If required by the user application, reliable end-to-end 
communication is ensured by the end-to-end protocol Transmission Control 
Protocol (TCP); if end-to-end reliability is not required, the simpler User Datagram 
Protocol (UDP) is used. These protocols contain an address called port number 
identifying the software the receiver must instantiate in order to interpret the infor-
mation content of the packet. Sometimes the port number is unique for a certain 
service. However, in most cases, knowing the port number is not enough informa-
tion to distinguish between various services. To do so, deeper analysis of the con-
tent of the packets is required. Differentiated treatment of Internet traffic will 
require some form of deep packet inspection; see 
7
Box 
21.1
.