Here’s a really simple net neutrality definition:

Net neutrality is a principle that bars Internet providers, primarily phone and cable companies, from charging higher rates to Web-based firms in return for giving their content priority treatment on the pathways to consumers. Without such restrictions, proponents say, a user might find it time-consuming, or even impossible, to call up a favorite site that carriers have relegated to slower lanes for economic or even philosophical reasons.

Neutrality On the Net Gets High ’08 Profile: Tech Issue Gains Traction in Election, By Charles Babington, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, February 20, 2007; Page D01

The same article notes that this issue is “obscure to many Americans.” It shouldn’t be: it affects everyone, Republican, Democrat, gun owner, or urbanite. Continue reading →

While it can involve many things, such as peering without settlements and flat fee access charges, there is a simple interconnectivity definition that even telephone companies have agreed to, in the FCC approval of the Bellsouth merger. What if that definition were made to apply to all Internet access, including IPTV? Would that prohibit ISPs from offering selective faster access? No:

Consumers (and Internet companies, for that matter) have paid, should pay and will pay for faster speeds if they need them. Some will want Ferraris, and some will choose Fords. The point is that the consumer decides for themselves how fast and where they want to go. Without Net Neutrality, the phone and companies will set the speed limit and decide which roads their customers can take, while collecting exorbitant tolls. While they’re at it, they’ll inspect each vehicle to see who should be sent to the back of the line.

Net Neutrality Foes Run Out of Gas, SavetheInternet.com, 6 Feb 2007

The telephone companies say they won’t inspect and toll, but if not, why are they opposed to net neutrality?

20 Maryland state representatives have sponsored a bill that says that broadband Internet providers in Maryland

“shall not provide or sell to internet content, application, or service providers, including any affiliate of a broadband company, any service that provides, degrades, or gives priority to any packet sources over that company’s broadband Internet access service based on its source, ownership or destination.”

This appears to be a performance-oriented version of an interconnection access, or bandwagon requirement. Continue reading →

The Dixie Chicks won five Grammies, which leads Jonathan Rintel to remark:

As the Chicks themselves chronicled in their Shut Up and Sing documentary, after lead singer and Texan Natalie Maines publicly said in 2003 that the Chicks were “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,” Clear Channel and Cumulus, two giant media conglomerates owning a combined 1,500+ radio stations, not only banned Chicks music from those stations, but in some cases organized public burnings of their recordings.

Grammys: Yes to Chicks, No to Censorship, Consolidation, Jonathan Rintels, Huffington Post, 02.12.2007

What surprises me is that few people seem to get the connection between what happened to the Chicks and what can happen to the Internet without net neutrality. If the Internet is accessible almost solely by a duopoly of cable companies and telephone companies, what’s to stop them from deciding any given artist, aggregator, etc. is doing something they don’t like and blocking them? Continue reading →

Since we’re discussing ancient history like Carterfone, let’s bring up some more. In the BPL Ham post I mentioned essential access bottleneck monopoly; here’s what that’s about.

When discussing net neutrality, it’s useful to distinguish two types of network access, as a professor from U.Penn has done:

“Access” has been and continues to be an important concept in regulation and antitrust. In this paper, I consider two interrelated access concepts: access to essential facilities (access¹) and access via interconnection to customers (access²). Neither concept is new; some industries are characterized by one or the other, some industries characterized by both. I argue that the public policy implications of each are rather different, and relate this difference to antitrust treatment of the “new” economy.

ACCESS != ACCESS¹ + ACCESS², Gerald R. Faulhaber, 2002

BOTTLENECKS AND BANDWAGONS: ACCESS POLICY IN THE NEW TELECOMMUNICATIONS, Gerald R. Faulhaber, 2002

In the second paper, he refers to the same two concepts as bottlenecks and bandwagons, respectively. Maybe we should call them faucets and tubes to match current terminology. Continue reading →

Most people have heard about Sen. Stevens series of tubes, but few people remember Cartfone, probably because most people using the Internet weren’t born in 1959 when Thomas Carter invented a device that let radio calls be fed through the telephone system, so oil riggers and the like could radio in telephone calls to home. Most Internet users weren’t born in 1968, either, when the FCC ruled that anybody (not just AT&T) could make devices to connect to the telephone network. Before that, your telephone equipment choice was basically a black brick with a dial, or a Princess phone that lit up. No wireless handsets, no cell phones, no answering machines, no faxes, no modems. The FCC ruling was necessary because when AT&T discovered Carterfone:

Then a monopoly, AT&T declared that any device that it didn’t make could potentially harm the network, even though about the only way to damage that era’s network of copper wires and electromechanical switches would’ve been with an ax.

FCC ruling from 1968 may have impact today, KEVIN MANEY, USA TODAY, February 1, 2007

Ancient history? Yes, but maybe worth repeating. Continue reading →