The Federal Communications Commission conducted a public hearing this week on network management before a group of law students – as opposed to, say, engineering students who are the ones who study network management – where lead witness Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) declared
[T]he Internet is as much mine and yours as it is Verizon’s, AT&T’s or Comcast’s. Please keep front and center in your examination the needs and wishes of the community of users rather than a small coterie of carriers.
As a matter of law, Markey would have flunked if that were an exam question. But of course the government has a right to try to control whatever it wishes one way or another.
The interesting and relevant question is whether and to what degree it’s possible to proscribe network management practices which most reasonable people would consider inappropriate without unintentionally preventing network providers from trying to improve their services while earning a competitive return on their investment.
“[C]learly, complicated network architectures, Internet viruses, and capacity limitations raise real-world, complex and valid questions, conceded FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps. “Our job is to figure out when and where you draw the line between discrimination and reasonable network management.”
Copps wants to impose a common carrier obligation on broadband providers so they’ll treat everyone’s communications equally, which is mostly what they do now on a voluntary basis.
Copps says he would also empower the FCC sit back and conduct a “systematic, expeditious, case-by-case approach for adjudicating claims of discrimination.”
That way, over time, we would develop a body of case law that would provide clear rules of the road for those who operate on the edge of the network, namely consumers and entrepreneurs, and those who operate the networks. It’s an approach that echoes easily off the walls of the nation’s oldest law school—because it’s in the ancient tradition of the English common law, the tree that grows from the roots up.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.