Convergence, Internet, and Net Neutrality Policy: What the Future Holds for the Internet and Online Content

Abstract

The Internet has emerged as the ultimate platform for convergence on the levels of technology, industry, and market due to its nondiscriminatory, best-effort architecture. All these levels of convergence are propelled by ideas, ideologies, and policies in a progressive and cyclical manner, bringing further technological advancement, industry, market, and policy changes. In response to convergence, net neutrality develops as a contested policy principle for regulating the relationship between Internet access providers and their users with an aim to ensure the openness of the Internet as a platform for creativity, innovation, and free expression for all. A critical analysis of the development of convergence in communications industries, policies, and global net neutrality policies, with the specific cases of the USA, EU, and UK in this chapter, projects ongoing negotiations and controversies concerning the levels of commitment to the nondiscrimination principle of net neutrality. It argues that minimal commitment to or absence of the net neutrality principle will produce a future Internet that continues or exacerbates market concentration in both the infrastructure and content sides of the communications industries.