The Web is Not the Internet

Today’s USA Today editorial on network neutrality exemplifies many of the things that are wrong with that debate:

Much of the Internet’s appeal is that no one controls it in the way that, say, a grocery store decides which brands to stock. Within its virtual walls, a start-up such as MySpace or Craigslist can surge to prominence entirely on the power of an idea.

Now, some very old-school companies want to change all that. Using market dominance achieved through the relative scarcity of lines into people’s homes, phone companies such as BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T are eyeing a system that would demand that operators of search engines, e-commerce sites and other Web applications pay them fees or be relegated to the slow lane.

In the first place, these companies have no ability to change “all that.” Each of them controls a fairly small share of the US residential broadband market. The Internet is bigger than residential customers, and it’s bigger than the United States. There’s no threat that AT&T, Comcast, or anyone else will change the way the Internet as a whole operates.

Secondly, the web is not the Internet. And in fact, the web is largely irrelevant to the debate. The bandwidth that’s available today is already more than enough to browse the web comfortably. Network neutrality regulations, if they are necessary at all, are required for next-generation services like video and voice, not web sites.

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