The FCC held a hearing today on Comcast's alleged 'Net neutrality violations, and the commissioners sure sounded serious about doing more than slapping Comcast's wrist.
Like a bookend, the day started with a rabid anti-Net neutrality editorial by former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler, entitled Internet Wrecking Ball, in the Wall Street Journal. Kessler argues that more bandwidth is what is needed on the Internet and that Net neutrality legislation actually works against that goal, and he goes on to blame archaic state and municipal video franchise rules for slowing down broadband deployment. He even says
"I personally would climb telephone poles on my street to run fiber if I could get 100 megabit Internet service."
Right. I'd like to see somebody call his bluff... they could charge admission to see a hedge fund manager climbing a telephone pole.
Meanwhile, GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham graded the debate at the FCC hearing today, and declared the FCC the winner, saying that
"Comcast Executive VP David Cohen, who argued that the company wasn’t blocking anyone’s content, but was merely trying to manage its network during times of peak traffic, didn’t come off too well."
Comcast may well learn a lesson from the FCC about upsetting consumers in an election year. That doesn't necessarily mean that Ed Markey's 'Net neutrality legislation is on a fast track to passage, though. I'm worried about legislation that ties an ISPs hands when it comes to traffic prioritization, and I'm guessing congress won't go that far, at least not this year. Maybe a more modest bill requiring full disclosure of traffic shaping and traffic blocking policies would be a better first step.
I really don’t think there’s a whole lot of long-term support for Net Neutrality, but it sure does make for some interesting dialog. As the Internet forms and transforms, so many people have so many views on what should be and what will be. These often conflicting and usually opposing views seem to miss the reality of what the Internet and Neutrality is all about.
The premise of neutrality is objectivity, or freedom from bias.
The premise of Net Neutrality is the absence of restrictions by those providing access on those for whom the access is provided.
If this sounds like the western expansion in the United States (and other countries before it), or if someone has burdened you with the metaphor of Internet expansion as space exploration, that’s because we, as humans, have the need to relate new things to old paradigms. If we are looking for something to really relate this to, it’s pretty simple . . . the Internet is like Utopia!
http://carterfsmith.blogspot.com/2008/02/utopic-neutrality.html
Posted by: Carter Smith | February 26, 2008 at 08:58 AM