Commentary: Net Neutrality
Thursday, June 22, 2006SUSIE GHARIB: Tonight`s commentator tackles a topic that Congress is tackling. It`s called net neutrality. Here`s Robert X. Cringley, columnist at pbs.org.
ROBERT X. CRINGELY, COLUMNIST, PBS.ORG: The U.S. Congress has recently been tussling with a technical concept called net neutrality. This either means that Internet service providers will be able to offer priority treatment to certain kinds of content - their own content or that of customers paying a premium or they`ll be prohibited from doing so.
This is arcane, but the value of this as yet unnamed congressional decision is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Internet service providers feel that they should be able to make money from priority services, while the nerds who invented the Internet thought that they specifically prohibited such special deals. That`s why Congress is involved. But given the preponderance of teleco lobbying dollars, the future of net neutrality is definitely in doubt.
This doesn`t mean, however, that we won`t still be able to download music and videos from the net because for all the whining of the cable and telecos, from a technical standpoint, the target of this push against net neutrality is only one thing, and that`s Internet telephone service. Internet telephone service is especially sensitive to packet meddling, meaning that an AT&T or Verizon can keep out a (INAUDIBLE) or a Vonnage. This is done all the time in other countries by the way where Internet manners are less genteel and local communication companies are more firmly in charge.
From the teleco perspective, what`s at stake is their voice service that they see as the basis of their fortunes. For the cable companies, it`s a chance to have an effective monopoly among their Internet customers. So net neutrality isn`t generally about Amazon or Apple or eBay or Google or Microsoft or Yahoo!. That is, unless they want to get into the telephone business, which of course they do or did. I`m Bob Cringely.
