Interesting Stuff

There seems to be a whole lot of talk all of a sudden about net neutrality recently, with editorials from both sides as well as grassroots websites on both sides. The basic debate is whether or not ISPs should give priority to certain packets of data getting to/from your computer, based on certain characteristics of the data (its source/destination, the type of application that is sending/receiving it, etc). A bit of an anti-regulation overview can be found here, including a quote from the head of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Alan Davidson. I’m tentatively leaning towards the pro-net neutrality side, but I think there are good arguments on both sides of the debate here.

On the anti-neutrality side,

• It would be nice if VoIP and streaming video were given priority over, say, email, since they need to be received in realtime, while my email can arrive half a second late and I won’t really notice. This would make realtime applications run better on hardware that can barely support them, and shouldn’t make a significant difference on hardware that can easily support them or hardware that can’t do it at all.
• This sounds silly, but it is the ISPs’ hardware that delivers the internet to you. They can really do anything they want with it. If you don’t like what they’re doing, switch ISPs. I can’t think of any legal argument that really prevents ISPs from doing this kind of thing.
• Tiers of service have worked in many other businesses: airline tickets have first class, coach, economy, etc. Shipping has 2-day delivery, 3-day delivery, ground delivery, etc. This would be a similar system, and is likely to operate at a similarly useful level.
• As a general rule, free markets work better than ones that have been regulated by the government. If ISPs want to start partnering with certain websites to deliver their content faster than their competitors, I suspect a lot of business could grow around such a concept, and lots of people would make lots of money. This isn’t necessarily good for the consumer (it has the potential to not be bad for the consumer, however), but it’s great for lots of businesses, and probably good for the economy.

On the pro-neutrality side,

• There have already been past incidents (most notably in Canada) of abuse of this system, in which things like VoIP service from the ISPs’ competitors had its quality intentionally degraded.
• We’re already paying ISPs for broadband internet access; we shouldn’t have to pay them again for the same broadband internet access to websites that aren’t affiliated with them. Such tiering would divide the internet into many different clusters and make inter-cluster communication more difficult.
• Giving preference to packets of one sort of application over another will likely discriminate against any new form of application that tries to run over the internet, making innovation harder.
• The internet is sort of like a public good, and from an economic standpoint, government regulation (in the form of a regulated monopoly) often is best for the consumer.

This next is a very weak argument and should not be persuasive at all, but a lot of people I would consider “good,” including Google and the creators of TCP/IP are in favor of net neutrality regulation. A lot of groups I would consider “bad,” such as large telecom companies, are against net neutrality. The one exception is that Jim Sensenbrenner, creator of the PATRIOT Act and general foe of civil liberties and privacy, is pro-net neutrality and even introduced the legislation about it (though it was voted down for the moment).

What do other people think of the issue? I imagine I’ve missed some important points in the debate somewhere, and if you know which ones, I’d like to hear about them. Other opinions are always welcomed.