The cover may feature Kim Jong-il, but you should skip past all that nuclear weapons stuff when you read this week’s Economist magazine and go straight to their special survey on telecommunications. In typical Economist fashion, the series of articles–cited earlier by Jim Harper–covers the length and breath of telecommunications from a global perspective.
Being fairly parochial, however, I found their comments on the neutrality regulation debate in the U.S. of particular interest:
…self-styled defenders of the internet like to portray the net-neutrality debate as a fight to stop evil telecoms firms messing with freedom and innovation. The reality is rather more complicated. For a start, the internet is not, in fact, neutral today. Fast broadband connections already cost more than slower ones, for consumers and businesses alike. As well as buying fast pipes and building huge “server farms”, big companies such as Google and eBay also pay extra for specialist “content delivery” services, such as Akamai, to make their websites download even faster. None of this has hampered innovation or hurt small companies.
It is also rather odd to see internet activists, who are generally suspicious of government intervention, calling for regulators to step in and pass new laws in the name of freedom. Laws mandating net neutrality could, in fact, do a great deal of harm. Ensuring “neutrality” could require regulators to interpose themselves in all kinds of agreements between network operators, content providers and consumers. Content-delivery services, such as Akamai’s, might suddenly become illegal. Strict rules could also hinder the development of new services that depend on being able to distinguish between different types of traffic. And it does make sense, after all, to be able to prioritise telephony and video traffic over e-mails. “We are talking about some people getting a better service if they are prepared to pay for it,” says Forrester’s Mr Godell.
By dressing up the net-neutrality debate as a fight for online freedom, however, Google, eBay and other big internet firms have cleverly diverted attention from an unpleasant truth. As telecoms firms around the world upgrade their networks, there are two ways in which they can recoup the money. They can simply charge subscribers more; or they can pursue new business models in which big internet firms and other content-providers pick up some of the bill too.
But the idea that big firms such as Google ought to contribute in some way to these costs “has been roundly greeted as if it is a threat to basic liberties,” notes Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein in New York. Despite their howls at the idea of paying for such services as packet prioritisation, he says, it would in fact be the big internet companies that would benefit most from the new business models that such premium services might unlock.
Worth reading.
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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