Sonia Arrison

Verizon switch is proof that Net neutrality legislation is not needed

Verizon originally rejected Naral text messages, as Tim notes below, but it quickly changed its tune when the news became public. That’s because there is competition in the marketplace and public pressure made Verizon act faster that it probably has on any other issue in the last year. This is one more example of why Net neutrality advocates should relax and focus their efforts on problems that actually exist, such as the waste and corruption in the Universal Service system.

Also, I have been meaning for a while to post PRI’s new paper on Net neutrality, so here it is.

September 28, 2007 | Comments |

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    One instance of a "success' does not prove anything. TechDirt reported (March 16, 2007) that the telco companies were blocking calls to FreeConference.com. Obviously this "proves" that Net neutrality is needed.

    Your post begs and obvious question. Verizon is unilaterally attempting to define the nature of the the traffic on its network to the detriment of some users. The problem is that they were caught. If a company has been caught with its hands-in-the-cookie charge, to use an analogy, that implies that it can not be trusted. In the future, Verizon could attempt to block text messaging from "Friends for the Ethical Treatment the Aliens from Mongo". Laws will not make a company trustworthy, but they may allow those who have been screwed to have recourse.

    On the Universal Service system, the post by Vince Vasquez lacks credible substance. From the perspective of a taxpayer, subsidies are an anathema. However, from the perspective of business subsidies are free money, corporate welfare. Were the marginal cost (of selling product to a customer who could not otherwise afford the product) is low - subsidies create demand for the product and increase a companies profits. Vasquez has not demonstrate how subsidies have hurt the telecoms.
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    Well, it didn't take too long for Verizon to once again get caught violating net neutrality concepts. Ed Felten reports (Nov. 12, 2007) on "Freedom to Tinker", that: "While many of us were discussing Comcast’s partial blocking of BitTorrent Traffic, and debating its implications for the net neutrality debate, a more clear-cut neutrality violation was apparently taking place on Verizon’s network — a redirection of Verizon customers’ failed DNS lookups, to drive traffic to Verizon’s own search engine. .... The effects of Verizon’s neutrality violation can be summarized simply: they interfer with a standard technical protocol; they cause harm on the whole, in part by breaking unrelated services; and they do this in order to override consumer choice by shifting traffic from consumer-chosen services to Verizon’s own services. This is pretty much the definition of a net neutrality violation."

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