More on the Hahn/Litan Paper
by Tim Lee 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.
The paper’s citation of Ed Felten is a little bit odd. They describe him as a “proponent of the end-to-end principle,” which he is, but they fail to mention that he ultimately comes down against new regulations. I think that’s unfortunate, because I think Felten’s line of argument–that discrimination is a complicated concept, and writing a good neutrality rule will be a lot more difficult than people expect–is pretty compelling. Indeed, it’s precisely the sort of argument that should be old hat to two old hands at analyzing regulatory issues, an arena where the law of unintended consequences is constantly raising its ugly head. So it’s a little strange that the authors would implicitly lump Felten in with Wu and Lessig as a proponent of new regulation, rather than citing him as one of the most articulate skeptics of new regulation.
I should emphasize that I agree with Hahn and Litan’s policy conclusion. And I certainly think it’s possible that priority-based pricing will be beneficial, and that’s a reasonable argument against premature regulatory intervention. But it doesn’t strike me as very likely, and I think the debate would be enhanced if those who did think it was likely (on both sides of the debate) paid a little bit more attention to the details of how it would actually work. I think that if they did so, supporters of regulation would find that it wasn’t as big a threat as they’d imagined, and critics would find that discrimination won’t solve as many problems as they hope it will.
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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