Net Neutrality
Monday, July 24, 2006
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I listened recently to an interesting discussion on the issue of "net neutrality" which took place at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington, D.C. I was able to listen from the comfort of my office in New York through the wonder called the Internet.
The discussion was promoted as a debate between Vincent Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, and David Farber, professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Cerf is often called the "father of the Internet" because he was one of the creators of the TCP/IP protocol. Farber, a pioneer in distributed computing, is often called the "grandfather of the Internet" because so many of his students have gone on to produce major network related technologies.
With Congress currently considering legislation which would significantly change the regulatory climate for the telecommunications industry, the two men disagreed on the issue. Farber, who served for a time as technology advisor to the Federal Communications Commission saw little need for additional regulation. Existing antitrust regulations, in Farber's view, will keep Internet service providers from acting in an anti-competitive manner. Cerf disagreed, observing that major service providers like AT&T and Verizon are talking about charging major content providers additional fees for handling their Internet traffic. Cerf says that kind of pricing policy will stifle innovation.
What I found most interesting was that the two men were more in agreement then in disagreement. Both believe that members of Congress, with few exceptions, lack the understanding of the technology and the economics required to analyze the issues. Both agree that the debate has been dominated by big companies, content providers like Amazon and Google, and service providers like AT&T and Verizon. Yet both sides claim to be champions of the consumer and both claim the "free Internet" is at risk.
A lot of this is nonsense. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch... I did not have to pay an admission fee to listen to the debate. But my employer shells out big bucks for the Internet connection in my office. These networks don't build themselves.
I have my own personal website, which I use to experiment with new software products, often by displaying family pictures. You should be able to find it from any web browser but you can expect my web pages to load slower than pages from Amazon, Google, or Yahoo. The reason is that those companies pay for much bigger pipes at their end than my inexpensive web hosting service supplies. The big guys can also afford to have their sites distributed on multiple servers in multiple locations tied to multiple Internet backbones, all in an effort to improve performance.
The Internet service providers can and do charge for bandwidth, that is how much traffic passes through their pipes. This seems reasonable and is an incentive to encourage carriers to upgrade their systems.
But charging different rates for traffic depending upon whose content it is is a different matter. Industry spokesmen, questioned about this, deny that any of the major carriers plan to discriminate based on who is delivering the message content. But there are already been cases where service providers have done exactly that. ISP Clearwire blocked Vonage voice traffic. EarthLink's service agreement reportedly allows it to do the same. If Verizon is your Internet service provider, what's to stop it from blocking your access to Vonage or any voice system other than its own? At the moment only Verizon's promise that it won't do so.
I have always been in favor of letting the free market set most of the rules. But I have made an exception in the case of a monopoly. Right now Comcast is the only high-speed Internet service provider available to my New Jersey home. I have been satisfied with its service although rates keep rising. Now Verizon is stringing fiber-optic cable in the neighborhood, and sometime soon I expect it will offer me fiber-based Internet service. My comparative evaluation will be based in part on price, in part on performance, but also in part on Verizon and Comcast's respective position concerning my right to unrestricted access to everything the Internet has to offer.
