The Man Who Invented the Web on Net Neutrality

[Xiahou]

I wonder if Tim's actually read what's being proposed? Notice how he also cites exactly 0 examples of unfair practices by ISPs that would be covered by this.

It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing. We pay for connection to the Net as though it were a cloud which magically delivers our packets. We may pay for a higher or a lower quality of service. We may pay for a service which has the characteristics of being good for video, or quality audio. But we each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to me.

It seems that here he's supporting tiered pricing for things such a streaming video, audio, ect. Again, it makes me wonder if he knows what the proponents of net neutrality are after....

The way the communications giants want to set things up is to have different levels of charges and fees for the businesses they provide lines. If they don't pay the fees then they lose good connectivity with their customers. The communications giants will be able to steer end users, like us, to those web sites which pay the higher fees. Would you visit a forum site like this, which can't afford to pay the kinds of fees they're discussing, if the pages loaded even slower than they do now? Multiply that across the internet. Better connectivity will be available to those who pay the fees, and the business partners of the communications giants. So you'll be able to get to Time-Warner affiliated web sites much easier than some web site hosted by a smaller ISP.

How is that any different than it is now? Or even any different than it has pretty much always been?

Remember a few months back when one of the major ISP's had a little tiff with Level 3 communications? Anyone trying to access web sites which resided on servers hosted by that ISP and it's affiliates were unable to access them at all if their internet routing went through Level 3 backbone. It went on for a few days. Affected sites, which people who had to go through Level 3 connections were unable to access, included Wikipedia, the entire University of California system - including Los Alamos of all places, and more. Those web sites were entirely unavailable to anyone whose packets were routed through Level 3. Level 3 routers simply stopped recognizing those blocks of ISPs as valid.

That was all about peering. Big Internet backbone companies allow each other access to their backbones free of charge. In this case (I believe) Level3 decided Cogent wasn't a big enough fish to give free access to anymore- they sorted it out and everything is peachy now. Regardless, I dont see what this has to do with net neutrality.


Finally, let me quote everyone's favorite libertarians- the Cato Institute:

Such rhetoric and calls for preemptive regulation are unjustified. There is no evidence that broadband operators are unfairly blocking access to websites or online services today, and there is no reason to expect them to do so in the future. No firm or industry has any sort of "bottleneck control" over or market power in the broadband marketplace; it is very much a competitive free-for-all, and no one has any idea what the future market will look like with so many new technologies and operators entering the picture. In the absence of clear harm, government typically doesn't regulate in a preemptive, prophylactic fashion as CBUI members are requesting.

Moreover, far from being something regulators should forbid, vertical integration of new features and services by broadband network operators is an essential part of the innovation strategy companies will need to use to compete and offer customers the services they demand. Network operators also have property rights in their systems that need to be acknowledged and honored. Net neutrality mandates would flout those property rights and reject freedom of contract in this marketplace.

The regulatory regime envisioned by Net neutrality mandates would also open the door to a great deal of potential "gaming" of the regulatory system and allow firms to use the regulatory system to hobble competitors. Worse yet, it would encourage more FCC regulation of the Internet and broadband markets in general.