Nicholas Negroponte: Net Neutrality Doesn't Make Sense | Big Think

In the early 1990s, it was clear that there was a new DNA for things that we thought were real, like print or movies. We didn’t understand until roughly 1990 that actually the fundamental representation was digital, and then you’d map that into a movie, a book, or writing. You know, signs in the sky with smoke signals or carving something into metal or whatever. But the fundamental element was digital, and because it was digital, the medium was not the message.

You can actually take any message and map it into media of one sort or another because the message was digital. Then you started to realize that a lot of things that were previously physical were, in fact, potentially virtual, and they lived in cyberspace. They lived in ways that are today taken for granted to be digital. So, the world of bits and atoms emerged, revealing just how much of our lives was made of bits.

Most people don’t realize that the word "bit" didn’t even exist in 1949. Nobody knew – it hadn’t been invented as a word. In the space of sixty plus years, it’s gone to being sort of kind of the basic element. We never thought of bits and atoms as related; that you could convert something from one to the other and there was a transformation.

Now, with some of the modern maker movement things where you do manufacturing at home, you transmit a part as bits, and then it gets created. It’s just again part of that same chain that has to do with the mixture of bits and atoms and the transition from a world dominated by atoms to a world dominated by bits. Country by country, it happens at different speeds, but it’s interesting to note that even the concept of a country is an atom’s concept.

It had an edge. You could be inside it or outside it. You stepped over a line, and you were in another country. Back – whether it was a river, whether it was a mountain, or whether it was an arbitrary line running through the desert – it came from the world of atoms. In some sense, to argue that this country is more digital than that country is correct. Korea, at least South Korea, is far ahead of many other countries. The United States is kind of in the middle. There are some countries that, for a variety of historical and regulatory reasons, are behind.

It’s all temporary. The whole world will be sort of on a somewhat equal basis within some short period of time. The term "net neutrality" has a little bit of a pejorative ring. How would you want something not to be neutral? In other words, neutrality seems to be a feature of good. So, yeah, you kind of want this to be net neutral. But the truth is, all bits are not created equal.

People don’t appreciate that a book, a normal novel, is about a megabyte, and yet a second of video is more than a megabyte. When you look at video for a couple of hours, it’s the equivalent of hundreds of books. If you have a pacemaker that transmits – this is an imaginary pacemaker now that communicates and monitors your health by sending data up to the Cloud – then a few bits of your heart data are, you know, a small fraction of a book.

So, you have bits that represent your heart, bits that represent books, and bits that represent video. To argue that they’re all equal is crazy. How do you reconcile that and still say neutral in some sense where some aren’t charged and some are charged, and so on? What I can assure you on the topic is those of us who were there at the beginning of the Internet never imagined that Netflix would represent 40 percent of it on Sunday afternoons.

It was just off the charts. We just didn’t think that. To me, there is a certain morality in that because, why the hell are you streaming video? Maybe streaming should be illegal. The point being that all bits aren’t created equal, and whether that resolves itself into net neutrality or not net neutrality is a separate story. In the food department, you could argue that genetics is their equivalent of bits and that you can create meat synthetically from the genes of meat. In other words, you...