A newspaper article claims that net neutrality is unnecessary and counterproductive:

On the present Internet, ISPs do have control over what information can pass through their infrastructure, but cases of actual unfair discrimination against certain services are extremely rare. Currently, both the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission have authority to enforce competition rules and punish Internet providers for discriminating against unaffiliated services.

Markets, not mandates, for Net, By Dominik Saran, Washington Times, February 28, 2007

Well, yes, the FCC could do that, but in August 2005 it chose to get rid of what remained of net neutrality and to replace it with four vague principles that are not enforced.

The article continues:

An even stronger disincentive to engage in such discriminatory behavior comes from customers. In fact, as in any other open market, the consumer ultimately enforces the conditions of service. This, coupled with people’s dislike of being coerced and manipulated, would spark widespread public outcry and force the ISP to back down from any heavy-handed practices. In the end, providers have few incentives to employ discriminatory practices. This proposed legislation is pre-emptive, cumbersome, and unnecessary, and will lead to unforeseen impacts.

Um, there is widespread public outcry against the telco-cableco duopoly and for net neutrality (see next post). That’s one reason Congress is for net neutrality.

As far as public outcry or even U.S. federal antitrust cases forcing a monopoly to back down from heavy-handed practices, see U.S. v. Microsoft. A decade in court and the monopoly remains.

As for incentives to employ discriminatory practices, telephone companies traditionally made much of their profits off of value-added services; that’s why they continued to charge extra for touch tone for many years. The current telco ISPs say they want to make money off of IPTV as a value added service. That gives them incentive to favor their IPTV service or channels or search engine or whatever over anyone else’s.

Worse, the inaptly named Internet Freedom Preservation Act would effectively block emerging technical innovations within the broadband Internet industry. Unfortunately, the companies lobbying for Net neutrality are shooting themselves in the foot by restricting their growth options and potential over future networks.

As mentioned in a previous post, almost all Internet innovations have come from outside the telcos. Plus, in Japan, even broadband innovation did, when SoftBank went out on a limb to push fast aDSL. NTT is trying to leapfrog SoftBank with FTTH, but it’s unlikely that would have happened if Softbank hadn’t gotten the Japanese government to let Softbank in.

One can even imagine a situation in which a robotic arm controlled by a surgeon on another continent performing a brain surgery would have to compete for bandwidth with teenagers downloading mp3s.

One could even imagine a situation in which a captured terrorist knows how to stop a massive bomb, too, but it’s never happened, and the chances of the terrorist actually knowing or being willing to divulge that information under any circumstances are very slim. Not that that stops certain parties from using such scare tactics to justify unfortunate (and unproductive) means of interrogation, even in cases that don’t resemble the far-fetched one.

Similarly, such a robotic arm probably wouldn’t be controled through the public Internet, and if it was, it would probably be done using sufficient bandwidth on both ends that there wouldn’t be a problem. Not to mention that not blocking by source and destination address doesn’t mean not shaping traffic flows in order to provide the connectivity service levels customers are paying for.

The article saves the best for last:

Sadly, the eclectic pro-net neutrality coalition includes both self-styled consumer advocates and major Internet content providers, such as Google and Microsoft. While the former endorse an awkward notion of “freedom by regulation,” the latter see a chance to free-ride by passing the costs of developing a better and faster Internet infrastructure solely to the ISPs. Some Internet companies that once embraced the virtues of the free market and entrepreneurship, now resort to government regulation to increase their profits.

That’s funny; I thought Google and Microsoft were paying customers of ISPs. If the ISPs aren’t charging enough to support the traffic such customers are producing, maybe the ISPs should review their prices for connectivity.

And what’s this about a free market? When the average user has at most two choices for Internet connection: telephone company or cable company? That’s not a free market; that’s a duopoly. That’s why net neutrality legislation or more competitors or both is needed.

-jsq