Cynthia over at IPDemocracy has a good post on Sen. Stevens’ proposed “Internet consumers bill of rights”:
The bill says that the FCC should “seek to preserve the free flow of information and ideas on the Internet” while preserving a competitive, unregulated market. More importantly, the bill says that Internet service providers “shall allow” consumers to:
(1) access and post any lawful content of that subscriber’s choosing;
(2) access any web page of that subscriber’s choosing;
(3) access and run any voice application, software, or service of that subscriber’s choosing;
(4) access and run any video application, software, or service of that subscriber’s choosing;
(5) access and run any email application, software, or service of that subscriber’s choosing;
(6) access and run any search engine of that subscriber’s choosing;
(7) access and run any other application, software, or service of that subscriber’s choosing;
(8) connect any legal device of that subscriber’s choosing to the Internet access equipment of that subscriber, if such device does not harm the network of the Internet service provider; and
(9) receive clear and conspicuous information, in plain language, about the estimated speeds, capabilities, limitations, and pricing of any Internet service offered to the public.
This certainly sounds like it should placate the neutrality advocates, as it addresses their ostensible goals: avoiding abuse by network providers. (That said, I believe the real motives of the savetheinternet crowd are to make the Internet into a public utility — hardly an inspiring vision.)
My question on the above bill of rights is, what do we mean by “access”? Is there a performance threshold? And does it preclude prioritizing some traffic over others, for a fee? The reason I ask is that it is essential to keep the government out of the business of dictating traffic on the net.
This is the essential problem with neutrality legislation: we need to preserve a full palette of experimentation, both technical and economic. Prohibitions on certain models will limit the reach and diversity of the net, and will add new layers of innovation-crushing bureaucracy.
Imagine, as Martin Geddes does, a decidedly non-neutral Yahoo!-branded service for $10/month (probably less, IMHO). The target audience are those who don’t want access to “everything” and are perfectly happy with email and Yahoo’s web portal.
If Yahoo! wanted to do a $10/month bundle deal with SBC where you could only access Yahoo! content, and consumers buy it, where’s the problem? Outlawing it hurts the most price-sensitive (read: poorest) customers.
This would be a perfectly useful addition to the marketplace, and would attract new users (say, grandparents) who are uninterested in paying higher fees for a “neutral” net that they don’t need. Neutrality advocates would call it a “walled garden”, and guess what — it is. Should such a service be legal?
Of course. The neutrality advocates are conflating their own preferences with consumers’ freedom to buy products of their choosing. This is a classic problem of liberal elitism: personal preferences become political causes, to the detriment of those who differ. (Think Wal-Mart shoppers.)
Consumer choice, on the high and low end, is highly democratizing. Let’s keep all options on the table.
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More here at News.com.
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