Tim Berners-Lee has a good article on the importance of network neutrality. He does a good job of explaining why it’s an important principle, and how it was crucial to his creation of the World Wide Web. But his conclusion is frustrating:
To actually design legislation which allows creative interconnections between different service providers, but ensures neutrality of the Net as a whole may be a difficult task. It is a very important one. The US should do it now, and, if it turns out to be the only way, be as draconian as to require financial isolation between IP providers and businesses in other layers.
Policy is about trade-offs. To endorse a legislative end without giving serious thought to the means is a recipe for disaster. The details of the legislative approach matter a lot: it’s likely that any attempt to regulate network neutrality will have some unintended consequences, and so we need to look at a specific piece of legislation and figure out what those unintended consequences might be. Yet a lot of people supporting the concept don’t seem very interested in any of those messy details. They figure that once we’ve convinced people that network neutrality is a good thing, we can let the telecom nerds work out how to enact that moral conviction into law. If they get their way, I bet a lot of them will be surprised to discover that the real-world results of their crusade aren’t anything like what they had envisioned.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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