Net Neutrality Making Headlines

When I saw the Fox News article, “Competing ‘Net Neutrality’ Bills Wend Their Way Through Congress” I immediately thought of Larry Lessig’s book “The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World” in which he passionately defends and argues for continuing the initial “end to end” design of the Internet. E2E design, he contends, is one of the main things which led to and continues to promote the creative, explosive growth of Internet technologies, the World-Wide Web, and web content. E2E design basically says that the intelligence is at either end of a network connection, and the network itself remains “dumb,” simply transporting packets from one address to another. As the Internet has matured, many proposals have been put forward to give certain packets priority based on different rationales. These schemes include “quality of service” (QOS) standards which permit certain kinds of connections, like videoconferences, to have priority over other types of connections that are not so dependent on constant, uninterrupted bandwidth. The more contentious proposed prioritizations are based on money and sponsorship, and I think that is what Lessig and others are upset about and opposing.

Not surprisingly, Lessig posted about the debate over proposed legislation on “net neutrality” recently. Among other sites, he is directing people to SaveTheInternet.com. As the Fox News article above highlights, this debate is putting interesting folks together who aren’t normally collaborators. This is a political issue where people are not lining up along traditional conservative and liberal lines, but rather more along statist / dynamist lines as Virginia Postrel discusses in her book “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.” I’m a little surprised to not see her writing about this on her own blog, but IP (intellectual property) is not really one of her main themes, I guess.

Scott Karp’s post “The Democratic Web Has Always Been An Illusion” is a thought provoking take (and slightly different than that of Lessig and others) on the “net neutrality” debates– he defends the ISPs in this debate and points out the economic logic of paying for bandwidth, writing:

Now, we as a society may decide that, like the air waves, no one should have the right to control internet access, but the ISPs are not “evil” because they want to make more money off of the the access routes that they currently own. And the comparison to the public air waves is also specious, because the airwaves exist for free — it costs nothing to maintain them.

The advent of broadband and the spiraling increase in bandwidth usage have lifted the veil on the web’s underlying undemocratic structure — it is, and always has been, about paying for access.

The comments on this post are enlightening– I won’t quote more here, but clearly this is a VERY important issue relating to “tolls” on the information superhighway. I disagree with the thrust of Scott’s post: I think the inherent nature of the web IS democratic, it represents a tectonic shift in idea sharing and publication that is remarkable to not only witness but live on a daily basis. I do think the question he raises is an important one, however: Should the Internet be treated as “a regulated utility?” It seems clear that the information superhighway is as important to economic development and the future growth of nations today as railroads were in the mid to late 1800s. This is a debate we need to pay attention to. The last mile to our schools needs to be paved with fiber, but someone has to foot the bill.

My hope is that Congressional legislation won’t create obstacles for innovation and creativity. Sadly, most new regulations support statist instead of dynamist approaches to behavior modification. I think the position of The National Grange is very reasonable in this case: These are complex issues, and Congress should NOT move too fast.

To learn more about this debate, check out the posts related to “broadband” and “net neutrality” over at Public Knowledge.

What do you think is at stake in this debate over “net neutrality?” Is the media (in typical style) over-hyping the issues here?

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