More on the Hahn/Litan Paper

by on January 24, 2007

A couple of other quick points about the Hahn/Litan paper:

  • Throughout the paper, the authors fail to distinguish between neutrality as a means and neutrality as an end. The standard argument for regulation isn’t that all Internet services must operate at precisely the same speed. It’s that certain means of advantaging some traffic over others–namely, network providers setting up routing policies that prioritizes incoming traffic based on who has paid extra for the privilege–will be damaging to the Internet as a whole. You can agree or disagree with that premise, but I don’t think it’s that hard of a point to understand. And it obviously doesn’t implicate services like Akamai, which aren’t network providers at all, and who achieve “non-neutral” ends through scrupulously neutral means.

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    Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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