Opinion Goodbye, Mr Chips

The tradition of college kids dreaming of world domination, and setting out to create giant entities like Apple and Google, is over (File)

Life flourishes only under very specific conditions, and the principle applies to many other organic systems, too. The digital industry is one such, and it took root in American soil because of two enabling factors — the vast defence resources thrown at it in the course of the Cold War, and the enabling environment provided by net neutrality. The internet is the civilian descendant of the Darpa military communications network. And it would not have scaled up so rapidly and disruptively without net neutrality, the idea that traffic should not be throttled according to the ability to pay. The principle of a level-playing field, which was taken for granted decades before it was given legal force by the Barack Obama administration, made the US internet industry the site of unprecedented technical and entrepreneurial creativity.

But now that the Federal Communications Commission has voted to repeal net neutrality law, the US is unlikely to remain the Mr Chips of the digital ecosystem, the pre-eminent market which taught the world how things were done. The tradition of college kids dreaming of world domination, and setting out to create giant entities like Apple and Google, is over. Now, the little guys cannot hope to do battle with the big brands, because the field is tilted against players without the ability to buy speed and preferential access. Similarly, users who can’t pay premiums may find themselves stuck in the slow lane, and the internet will cease to be the brave new world of social and political action.

Advertisement

As the US industry goes into decline, digital creativity will flee in search of less unequal markets like India, China and Europe. And ironically, the land where the internet was born, and incubated under the principle of equal access, may be reduced to a digital backwater.