A lot of ink has been used lately covering all the facets of the “Net Neutrality” debate.  In particular, everyone from small time bloggers to major news organizations are covering the FCC and whether or not the Internet is going to become more of a pay to play service.  But while catch-phrases like “fast lane” and “net neutrality” have become commonplace – somehow NSTIC (National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace) continues to fly under the radar.  And in terms of our own livelihood here at SlickRockWeb – there hasn’t been a lot said about how all of these potentially huge structural changes to the Internet are going to change the landscape of search engine optimization (SEO).

Odds are if you are reading this article, you are already up to speed on the FCC debate.  In a nutshell, the worry is that Internet Service Providers ISPs) are going to be able to further monetize the sending and receiving of data by controlling the bandwidth and basic Internet speeds within their networks depending on what kind of information is being sent and/or who is sending the information. In essence a loss of “Net Neutrality”. The result being that major sites (Netflix, Google, ESPN, Amazon, etc.) will be able to fork over the huge sums of cash it’ll take to distribute their content quickly in the fast lane.  But, the smaller sites (the rest of us) will be confined to the much slower lane of the Internet. There is the additional fear that political influence, political ideologies and basic cronyism will also determine which Internet lane you are relegated to. There would no longer be the relatively “free flow of information” across the Internet. The loss of “Net Neutrality” would basically create a social stratification of the Internet and this would squash innovation and create an Internet where the new ideas could only come from the companies already at the top.  You know, trickle down innovation.

But while these sorts of changes would drastically alter the way the Internet functions, the impact on SEO would initially be minimal.  If anything, web design itself might be more affected.  Multimedia rich sites could be hurt if the slowdown is as bad as some might expect.  Page load times would definitely suffer so figuring out site design issues to create a good user experience in slow speed conditions would probably be the major takeaway.  The way search results are gathered and ranked wouldn’t be altered much, except for the differences in user experience metrics like page loading speeds and bounce rates.

This brings us to NSTIC.  The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is as big brother-ish as it sounds.  The idea is that people are terrible about creating good passwords and even worse about not clicking on obvious viruses in their email.  This results in fraudulent purchases and identity theft issues.  The solution being proposed is a ‘pseudo anonymous’ identity that you would use for everything online.  By doing this, you would create a MOSTLY anonymous profile that would be tied to this unique online identity.  It would be sort of like how you can now sign into non Google sites using your Google account – only on a much broader scale. The rationale, at least from the commercial entities involved, is that a single unique online ID assigned to each person would save companies big bucks by not having to spend their resources verifying your identity or dealing with bad purchases.

OK.  First off, this solution doesn’t solve the password problem.  It just pushes it to the side a little bit.  There would still be plenty of room for terrible passwords on smaller sites, or sites that don’t chose to use NSTIC (if that is an option).  Secondly, people are still going to get caught by phishing emails. Thirdly, this is about as close to a national ID card as one can get. Alex Jones could actually inadvertently end up being correct on this conspiracy. In our opinion, NSTIC helps the bottom line for big businesses but not much else.

However, what’s really frightening is the pseudo in “pseudo anonymity.” You would not actually be anonymous.  The entity that is providing you with the secure identity will have all your info.  And that entity can also get hacked.  It’s an almost certainty.  That’s how the Internet works or not works depending on your point of view.  Sooner or later, all of your personal information from medical records to banking statements to photos would be compromised, and now all at once.  And what really brings this full circle is that those entities, that would be housing that information and providing these secure identities, would be the same big companies that the FCC is looking to cement in place as the rulers of the realm.  The fast laners.

Let’s take a step back from conspiracy theories and whether you believe that mega-corporations will always take the societal common good into account when making their decisions, and look at how this might change SEO practices.  If the Internet is going to be driven by these secure identities – that means that the Internet experience will become very individually tailored.  Every site you visit, whether a “social” site or not will become a very personalized experience for the ads you see and the content that gets displayed.  However, the user information and data SEOs have had access to in the past, in order to facilitate that user experience, is likely to dry up.

Google has already given us a glimpse of this through both Google Analytics and Google +.  In Analytics, in an attempt to keep user data private, keyword data has been basically eliminated from reports.  As these identities are rolled out – it’s possible that almost all user data is going to be something Google will want to protect and/or monetize.  Analytics reports could become a thing of the past, with only the most general of information being accessible.  It’s also easy to see just how much Google +, a social site, has come to affect rankings. Your search history and browsing data already influences search results, but now social circles could as well.  This would mean rel=’author’ or ‘publisher’ tags could become incredibly important.  A very linked-in publisher would have a much better chance of ranking over that of a publisher that had not developed much of a social network and that already seems to be the case in some instances.

Web design gets changed in this scenario as well.  Ecommerce sites in particular will need to totally redesign themselves to become compliant with NSTIC standards.  Innovations on how to tailor content to each individual would also need to be made.  All the while living in the slow lane of Internet speeds, if you are a small retail shop.  It’s gonna be tricky.

In the end, we believe the best steps now are to start pushing social media management and figuring out ways to boost page load speeds before it becomes a necessity.  Even if none of this comes to pass – boosting those two factors is a good idea.  And after you finish that, just make sure you’re enjoying the Internet or the series of tubes (as Senator Ted Stevens once called it) before the powers that be try to or inadvertently ruin it forever.

Eric Company News, SEO and SEM