Freezing the ‘Net

TechDirt points to an excellent article on network neutrality:

Reality check: why doesn’t your landline phone do most of the things your cellphone does? It doesn’t have to worry about either battery life or size? The reason is that it’s attached to the traditional phone network on which innovation simply can’t happen. Telcos would like to make the Internet a similar innovation-free and profit-safe zone.

OK. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Proponents of net neutrality legislation say there oughtta be a law. But plenty of smart people–perhaps represented best by Martin Geddes–argue that a net neutrality law would be counterproductive. Turns out that neutrality itself is very hard to define. Should a neutral network be prohibited from blocking packets which attack the network itself? What about spam–does it have to be treated neutrally? What if someone invents a special purpose network good for connecting vending machines to something or other; does that network have to provide Google access in a non-discriminatory manner?

Once neutrality is defined by regulation and enforced by bureaucrats, the requirement itself could become an obstacle to innovation. Even more scary, given the skill of the telcos in manipulating congress (can you say “campaign contribution”?) and the FCC, could the neutrality requirement end up being enforced only against innovators? What if there were a five year wait for a “neutrality” permit before a new application could be deployed. Wouldn’t the telcos love that? Come to think of it, they have been pretty good lately at getting the FCC and the courts to throw obstacles in the way of VoIP.

The article goes on to argue that the real issue is the lack of competition in the broadband market. As some commenters to Tuesday’s post point out, there’s a lack of good data about exactly how many choices the average consumer has, but I think everyone can agree that more choice and competition would be better.

I also think it’s worth pointing out something about the traditional telephone network: the phone network is precisely the model that Larry Lessig holds up as a model for beneficial “common carrier” regulation. I suspect that a big part of the reason that cell phones have become so much more capable than their tethered counterparts is that the Baby Bells have been slowed down by the FCC’s “common carrier” regulations from offering new products and services. Lessig argues, with some plausibility, that those regulatory requirements led to the fiercely competitive dial-up Internet market, but it also caused the landline telephone market itself to be pretty stagnant. That doesn’t strike me as a good model for the Internet.

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