Here’s Sonia Arrison writing on "net neutrality" over at News.com. Be sure to check out the comments at bottom, some interesting stuff going on there. A lot of traditionalists from the phone-monopoly age arguing against her.
The essence of the issue, to me, is not what has come before but what comes next. At stake is the possibility that the FCC would be, first and foremost, categorizing technologies for the purpose of regulating them.
While this may be tempting as an intellectual exercise, it is extremely short-sighted. Ten years ago, when the last major telecom bill was passed, there was no understanding of concepts like VoIP (Skype, Vonage), peer-to-peer in all its forms (BitTorrent) or video search engines (Google). They could not be anticipated, as this is the nature of revolutionary technology.
Because they weren’t anticipated, they were not regulated. It goes to show that the most important technologies come to be based on innovation and merit in the eyes of the consumer, not government definition. The short history of the Web is a great testament to this.
There are no existing net neutrality regulations. There have been no confirmed net neutrality problems. Such legislation is a punishment in search of a crime.
The consumer will make the call. If Google video runs 10% faster than Uncle John’s Animal Husbandry Blog, because Google paid for better performance, I don’t think the consumer will revolt. They will vote with their $$.
If a carrier abuses its position in the market — a very remote possibility, given the ever-increasing levels of competition — it can be dealt with under existing anti-monopoly regulations. Let’s cross that hypothetical bridge when we come to it.
To mix a metaphor, let’s not kill chickens before they are hatched. Let’s not let bureaucrats decide what the Internet is, while it's still in its infancy.
Update: a poll on this subject over at Light Reading. Sounds like the tech libertarians are in the majority.
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