This idea of the Internet as level playing field – that all data is treated the same regardless of source, destination or content – is called net neutrality. Content can’t be blocked, slowed down, sped up, or interfered with in any way. It’s all equal. For many netizens and content providers large and small, net neutrality is a sacred principle, often called the First Amendment of the Internet. For the owners of the pipes, though – the cable companies and telco Internet Service Providers – and some of the largest content and tech companies, there’s money to be made, advantage to be had, and new value and choices to be delivered to consumers if the Net were not quite so neutral.
What does it mean for business?
Like everything about net neutrality, it’s not a simple question to answer. If you’re a company with some depth to your pockets, an unregulated Internet with paid premium pipes could be a huge competitive edge. Your fast-loading content will make for the best user experience, putting your competition at a disadvantage they may not be able to overcome, if they can’t also ante up for the faster pipe.
If you’re an entertainment company, you have reason to be concerned, as you likely already are. Without net neutrality, nothing’s to stop the companies that control the pipes from creating their own premium entertainment channels.
And obviously, if you’re an ISP, you have the opportunity to make a lot more money with very little effort if net neutrality goes away. Without laying one more inch of fiber, you can start collecting fees from anyone who wants their content delivered quickly.
So what about the rest of the business world? Software-as-a-Service companies in particular have a lot to worry about, but they have not been very vocal in the debate. Businesses that depend on cloud applications everyday have performance expectations that have to be met. If SaaS providers have to pay more to make sure their applications stay up to speed, it’s going to impact their business models – reducing profits, increasing costs to end users, or both.
The bottom line is, we already know that users start abandoning sites after waiting just four seconds for them to load. If the big competitor’s site loads faster, that’s where users are going to go. Better make sure you’re doing everything you can right now to make sure your site is a lean, mean speed machine.
What can businesses do to prepare?
Businesses can’t afford to put their heads in the sand and hope net neutrality works out in their favor. Even if net neutrality becomes a formal regulation, you’ll still be a more competitive business if you optimize your site for speed and performance.
A sound strategy for optimizing performance today and in the future includes following best practices in page construction – minding script and object placement, reducing external calls, keeping assets small – and following a robust and consistent performance monitoring program in the field at the end-user level, so performance issues and hiccups can be quickly identified and corrected. This strategy is doubly important on the mobile side, where networks are less consistent and speeds inherently slower.