The Underwhelming Threat to Network Neutrality

I find myself unimpressed by this site urging people to contact their Congresscritter and support network neutrality. We’re told:

This broadband assault would reduce your choices and stifle the spread of innovative and independent ideas that we’ve come to expect online. It would shift the digital revolution into reverse.

Internet gatekeepers have already:

Blocked services: In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.

Blocked content: In 2005, Canada’s telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute.

If these media giants get their way, they’ll shut down the free flow of information and dictate how you use the Internet forever.

That sounds at least moderately ominous. Let’s dig a little deeper:

Here is a story about the Madison River incident. Madison River bills itself as the 17th largest phone company in the US with 234,000 customers. It decision to block the service earned it a fine from the FCC, and it agreed to stop doing it. I wasn’t able to find the details about the grounds of the FCC complaint, but it appears that the FCC already has at least some authority in this area. That doesn’t seem like grounds for new legislation.

Then we have details about the Telus incident, from Professor Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa:

Given the importance of the neutrality principle, it is surprising to learn that Canadian law does not appear to currently provide a definitive legal requirement to maintain such neutrality. This became evident in late July 2005 when Telus, Canada’s second largest telecommunications company, actively blocked access to Voices for Change, a website supporting the Telecommunications Workers Union. Telus was embroiled in a contentious labour dispute with the union, yet its decision to unilaterally block subscriber access to the site was unprecedented.

The company argued that content on the site raised privacy and security issues for certain of its employees. Nevertheless, the blockage of the site was completely ineffective since it remained available to anyone outside the Telus network. Moreover, those within the Telus network could access the site with a bit of creative Internet surfing.

The appropriate approach for Telus would have been the same formula it advises law enforcement and copyright holders to follow–to obtain a court order to get the site removed. In fact, that was precisely what Telus ultimately did. By first unilaterally blocking the site, however, Telus raised a host of challenging legal issues. The company argued that its subscriber contract granted it the right to block content. While that may be true for its roughly one million retail subscribers, the blockage occurred at the Internet backbone level, thereby blocking access for other ISPs (and their customers) that use Telus as their provider.

Now, Canada isn’t exactly a police state. If they were able to get a Canadian court to order it be taken down, I think it’s safe to assume this was not a run-of-the-mill political website. Telus may actually have had good reasons for taking the site down. It certainly doesn’t look like their goal was to silence all web sites that were critical of their actions. Moreover, as Geist points out, it was still possible to access the website from Telus’s servers with a bit of “creative Internet surfing.”

I have to assume the people making the website chose the two most striking examples of network discrimination they could find. Apparently, the best they could come up with is a tiny North Carolina telephone company trying to block VOIP (and getting their knuckles rapped by the FCC) and a Canadian company blocking a website that raised sufficient “privacy and security concerns” that they subsequently got it removed by court order.

On a continent with more than 300 million consumers and dozens of broadband companies, these are the most egregious examples they can come up with? Color me unimpressed.

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