An editorial on Net Neutrality that was published this past weekend in The Wall Street Journal compared its advocates to starving frogs. Yes, you read that right … well, mostly. Actually, the comparison offered was to frogs that, having failed to move, could not recognize the abundance around them. Now in some ways I must say that I am in agreement with the article’s point that the fear of the Boogie Man is the best that most of these true believers are able to offer.
As a reformed Bellhead, I have tried to get my IETF friends to define “Best Effort” in a substantive way, one that would compel the carriers to establish a bar. The innovators, though, correctly understood and refused to delineate the concept.
In effect, “Best Effort” means that the completion of transmission is more important than the quality of the transmission, and the reality is that the Internet has always managed to survive engineering stupidity and spite. It was originally designed for redundancy, and through the 20+ years of its commercial history many bottlenecks have come and gone. An example? When the Middle East’s undersea optic cables were cut, the Internet survived.
Image via Shutterstock
So the issue is not about the Internet, but about the access offered by service providers. As we have seen, various countries in recent history have firewalled their territory in an attempt to keep their citizens ignorant, and the question is whether there is a scenario where service providers might act in a similar manner.
In conversation with Wasp BarCode’s Brian Sutter (not the hockey player), the subject of the implications of Net Neutrality from a small business perspective arose. From his perspective, a day might be coming when content producers will be shut out like the cable operators and the major production companies (i.e., Fox vs. TimeWarner, CBS vs. Comcast). Specifically, BarCode produces a lot of YouTube content for sales leads, so Sutter’s question is whether there is a scenario in which YouTube could be blocked. This sounds somewhat farfetched to me. However I am still at a loss as to how Time Warner and CBS were unable to find common ground just a week before football season, yet were ready to spend a small fortune to broadcast their positions to the general public.
Perhaps the real issue is one of jurisdiction. Without Net Neutrality the Internet is akin to Interstate Commerce, which means it probably belongs under the auspices of the FTC and not the FCC.
ATT preferred partners is pointed out in the WSJ article, which can be considered an 800 number-like service in that it allows for content that is not counted against a subscriber’s megabit limit. The FROG lovers of the world suggest that this will lead to blocked services, though that is a prime example of FEAR (False Evidence Appearing Real).
In our SuperWiFi and Shared Spectrum show, we still welcome a hopeful crowd that can imagine a competitive access marketplace beyond the duopoly in wireline and wireless. If the FCC is going to fight for neutrality, their end goal should be to stimulate more competition and not just ever-more robust measurement.
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