A vision of a neutral net

Tom Giovanetti over at the Mercury News describes what a world of net neutrality will look like. It has an excellent title too: "Network neutrality? Welcome to the stupid Internet"

Suddenly, the TV image goes pixilated, and then dark. The phone call drops. You hear yelling from your teenagers' rooms. But that's not all.

Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios.

Turns out that tonight is also the night of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, as well as the night Coldplay releases its latest song online. And YouTube has just released embarrassing video of a major Hollywood star having a ``wardrobe malfunction.'' Extremely high demand on the Internet is overwhelming available bandwidth, and regulations passed back in 2006 make it illegal for network operators to differentiate and prioritize content. [...]

Welcome to the world of network neutrality, where all content is treated exactly the same; where telecom and cable companies are legally prohibited from giving certain types of content priority handling. A world where somebody decided that a stupid network is better than a smart network. Well, how well did that work out?

In the world of electricity, we call this a rolling blackout. It happens because a highly regulated market can’t cope with elastic demand. By making it illegal to build and charge for prioritization of services (as the Markey amendment would have done), the network becomes dumb and underbuilt.

(At my company here in California, rolling blackouts of a few years ago took our worldwide server room offline.)

Simply put, we have to prioritize if the Internet is going to adapt to the next wave of consumer demands. We have to reward investment and innovation. And we have to have the flexibility to build intelligence into the network.

I’ve said before that our sclerotic public utilities are a great example of how not to build a network. Asking for regulated net neutrality is a guarantee of scarcity, bad service, and few consumer choices, à la PG&E.

The neutrality proponents are overtly asking for a utility model. We’ve been there before folks, and in many cases, we are still there. The Internet deserves better.

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Another good analogy of supply not responding to demand is our roads. James DeLong expands on the analogy. When under high-traffic stress, roads simply don’t perform, and they don’t discriminate. Other times, they are vastly underutilized.

Some people compare our information superhighway to our physical highway system. Besides being a bad analogy (networks can adapt where roads cannot), it also points out how poorly government services scale, by their very nature.

[Editor: Um, it's both a good analogy *and* a bad one?]

Hmm, um...call it analogy neutrality.

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