In its current incarnation, the idea of “net neutrality” is masking an effort to impose regulation and government oversight of the Internet, where no such thing had been done before.
Today’s deadtree edition of the Wall Street Journal has an editorial on net neutrality:
Net neutrality is generally billed as a way of reining in Internet service providers (typically phone and cable companies), some of whom have made noises about charging content companies extra fees for guaranteeing priority to certain kinds of services. Net neutrality is supposed to save us — and Google and Yahoo — from this supposedly unconscionable behavior. Its effect would be more damaging.
It’s worth putting this zealotry in a broader historical context. In the decade or so since the commercialization of the Internet began in earnest, the number of users, the speed of their connections and the variety of things they can do on the Net have all rushed forward. Blissfully, but not coincidentally, all this has been accomplished with a light regulatory touch. Excepting pornography and gambling, no bureaucrats have decided what services could be provided over the Internet, or who could offer them or how they could charge for them.
The result has been rich and diverse…
As my husband, a network engineer, likes to point out: quality-of-service (QOS) problems can all be solved by increasing bandwidth. Right now, we’re gulping down the excess bandwidth created before the dot-com bubble burst; all the dark fiber is being snatched up and lit up. If demand continues putting pressure on ISPs, a mechanism must be in place to contain the demand and provide capital for investment in infrastructure to increase bandwidth. Such a mechanism is already in place, and it’s most emphatically not government regulation. It’s the free market.
The Internet ain’t broke; don’t fix it.
[...] cehwiedel at Kicking Over My Traces comments on Net Neutrality, in the context of providing access to telecom services. [...]