What Happens To Cloud Computing When Net Neutrality Is Dead?

Net neutrality has been in news and discussion a lot lately, but as we see, there’s less attention on its impact on Cloud computing and small business. 

Net neutrality has been in discussion a lot recently yet its association to, and influence on Cloud computing seems to draw less attention. Following the statement of Public Knowledge (primarily applying to both organizations and apps, not only individuals), Net neutrality is the key that every individual needs to be free to have access to the content and applications without any discrimination from the Internet service providers against other services online.

In other words, we can call it the rule that the firm linking you to the Internet won’t be able to control whatever you do online. But net neutrality owns various meanings based on individual perspective and marketing targets. So what can it really mean?

The True Meaning of Net Neutrality

With Net neutrality, every bit is created equally

Known as always the case for IT terminology, (just like cloud computing), net neutrality owns a horde of meanings depending on each person’s view of point and scope of interest. As a matter of fact, net neutrality implements the three basic rules, including no blocking, no throttling, and no paid priority traffic. Here come a few questions coming up to your mind:

• Is the Internet indeed a public source that is available to everybody in the same conditions? Is it true for both shared and dedicated network sources? 
• Is the Internet mainly a national issue, or even a global harmonized method needed?
• What is the actual scope of the Internet (is it just a transport provider, or including any content or application within the network and at the endpoints?)
• Is it good for net neutrality to access to the public Internet or every IP-based network? Can a private network share the same wires as the open Internet?
• Do the principles of net neutrality influence the governance, control, performance, and quality of the Internet? How can all breaches of net neutrality be spotted and reported?

It often relies on two overall technical principles popular in today’s Internet standards:

• Best efforts delivery: the entire network tries to introduce packet to its destination with no discrimination and no guarantee of performance.
• End-to-end principle: any application-specific function needs only be carried out at the end points of the network, not at the intermediate nodes.

How about cloud computing neutrality?

There are three basic rules of net neutrality applying to cloud computing

Does neutrality apply to cloud computing equally or are they just various issues? In case net neutrality applies to the open Internet, then have you wonder if cloud neutrality truly relates to the open information processing and storage services?
As we mentioned above, there are three distinct rules of net neutrality applying to cloud computing:

1. No blocking: Providers won’t get to limit or block the access to cloud computing and storage services
2. No throttling: Providers must not favor one client over another in some specific areas, from capacity, accessibility, or responsiveness
3. No paid priority: Providers can’t selectively provide better services to their chosen clients at the expense of other customers

For instances, the following are possible:

• A provider possibly favors a search engine over another by dodging or slowing down the searching and scanning
• A provider can reduce the quality of response times for certain firms, like broker for example 

It’s possible to say that lack of net neutrality is the most likely to prevent the cloud computing from progressing and probably not good enough for any infrastructure enterprise, apps providers, and even consumers.

How are cloud providers affected without neutrality?

A non-neutrality Internet makes cloud adoption inactive 

There’s a quick lane solution that stands for an artificial advantage for such sites with some resources to pay for it. It means a shortage of innovation on cloud vendors, especially when they end up spending extra funds to have data moved faster while getting one leg up on their contest.

So an Internet without neutrality probably causes cloud adoption more inactive as compared to other smaller businesses. When a cloud software provider must spend more for quick lanes, such costs would be easily kept on to the user, which will improve the barrier to cloud use. The outcome might be a decline in cloud adoption rates, or at the least performance of cloud-based software devalues.

Besides, the innovation on the entire Internet has not been adjusted without any new government regulation. The ISP’s can easily grow other innovative methods apart from that fast lane solution that Net Neutrality supporters are scared of.

Government rules are quite complex, too, as far as other technical areas are concerned, must be updated when new technology is boosted. This offers bigger firms and cloud providers a big advantage over their contest since they would own the sources to allot to larger legal budgets to contribute to learning new rules.

The spirit of net neutrality can be seen as an admirable desire to maintain the Internet both free and open. People love to find ways to do that while recognizing the highest need to keep investing in broadband networks, the digital infrastructure on which the Internet - and, truly, almost every future innovation - relies on.

Net neutrality repeal, what will happen to IoT and Cloud Computing?

With no rule in place, the Internet service providers will be free to control the traffic over the networks by blocking or slowing down traffic from other services and websites. A few critics state that cloud computing and IoT (Internet of Things) business models can be threatened.

While several ISPs have stated not to block or slow any traffic, the net neutrality repeal means that they could even block any service known as bandwidth hogs or slow down traffic from other services that fight against their own or the partner businesses.

According to one investment counselor in Oregon, during the net neutrality proceeding, speedy access is crucial to her entire business. Since the business is tiny, it’s a part of the whole economy, and any restriction on access or speed could hurt her access to the stock exchange.

However, if you have a business with over $1 billion in revenue, the net neutrality repeal is just unable to affect you for sure. It’s because you typically have great customs and agreements in place with the Internet service providers that remove any throttling they do.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that the large companies using the cloud computing tend to be nearly immune from other effects of the net neutrality changes, we recommend that they need to keep one eye out. Keep in mind that the clients who utilize cloud have the final authority - the capacity of voting with your money.