Norwegian ISP Discriminates, Backs Down after Customer Outcry

Via EFF, a Norwegian company, NextGenTel, apparently decided to limit the bandwidth of sites that didn’t pay NextGenTel extra for the privilege of offering high-speed content to their customers. After a consumer backlash, however, the ISP backed down:

It seems like the customers won this battle (link, to Norwegian article). Due to bad publicity and reactions from customers NextGenTel have removed the limit and NRK is now back on full speed in their network. What should I say? Thanks to the people contacting NextGenTel and to the blogs and media that understand how this was a serious violation to network neutrality.

A lot of pro-regulatory folks assume that “network neutrality is good” necessarily implies “network neutrality ought to be mandated by the government. But the latter doesn’t automatically follow from the former. Government regulation is a cumbersome process fraught with potentials for unintended consequences. If violations of network neutrality can be dealt with in the marketplace, that strikes me as a far better solution.

Now, it’s quite possible that Norway has a more competitive broadband market. If so, advocates of regulation could certainly argue that the results wouldn’t be so rosy if an American company tried the same stunt. But even if that’s true, I think this incident demonstrates that ISP discrimination will generate a customer backlash. Hopefully, that will be enough to force AT&T or Comcast to reverse a bone-headed decision to discriminate simply to keep their customers happy. But if a major American ISP is not responsive to customer outrage, the backlash is likely to generate considerable momentum for Congress to enact neutrality regulations.

The bottom line is that it’s premature to pass regulations based purely on speculative threats. The current competition among two or three ISPs in any given area may be sufficient to make ISPs behave without Congress getting involved at all. I think it will. But even if I’m wrong, we’ll get much better legislation if we wait until we have a concrete example of discrimination to examine, so that we can craft a rule that minimizes the impact of the rule on parts of the Internet where no regulation is needed.

SHARE: