The net neutrality amendment offered as a part of a House committee's bill reforming the FCC's role in
telecommunications struck out before it had a chance to hit the House floor, effectively giving large network carriers
like AT&T rise to penalize or otherwise impede the traffic of content providers whose traffic crosses their
network. Man, that was a long sentence.
Here's my take. The job of the network is to carry
content. But as more and more monolithic applications--like television and telephony--become content plays
themselves, the big carriers are sweating a bit. These are areas of their expertise. Before telephony could even
be considered content, it was essentially dominated by the network carriers, and the only purpose of the network was
telephony.
With the advent of realtime Internet communications, including voice and video systems, it seems
that the big carriers no longer want to carry all content--at least not in a manner that provides the utmost quality to
the content providers--because they view those providers more and more as competitors in their sweet spot--voice and
video. At the heart of the desire to impede competing providers is the untrue argument that "there's not
enough bandwidth" to support them--a la the chicken little backlash by the Bells against BitTorrent. I just
don't understand this reasoning. Bandwidth isn't a limited resource. The answer has never been to conserve
bandwidth. The answer is always more bandwidth--and this is a fine solution, because we don't dig bandwidth out the
ground and refine it, and the cost to provide more bandwidth is a lot less than the cost to build systems that can
authenticate "authorized" high-speed services from those that Ma Bell hand picks to toss into the slow lane.
If the big Bells begin to actually impede, or "tax" realtime content on the Internet, what will
happen?
I suspect that the free market will answer with one or more neutral networks, a sort of counter-tide
coming from the software and service sectors, whose intent is to decrease the cost of high-speed bandwidth. A
second set of Internet pathways, unhindered by the Bell's sabre-rattling and threats of bandwidth favoritism. A
second Internet backbone whose primary selling point is neutrality. See any value there?
Let's start
it.
