Here’s another fun oops-what-have-we-just-done? story, from PC World:
Net neutrality and 5G may be on a collision course as the mobile industry tries to prepare for a wide range of mobile applications with differing needs.
The net neutrality rules passed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission last week have raised some eyebrows at Mobile World Congress this week. The full text of the rules isn’t public yet, but mobile movers and shakers are having their say. The latest questions involve 5G, the next-generation standard that everyone here is trying to plan for.
The most common thing they think 5G will have to do is to serve a lot of different purposes. Regulators’ attempts to ban “fast lanes” and other special treatment might make that impossible, people who’ve been thinking about 5G said Wednesday.
Amazingly, when you hand over the key to the government — especially when you haven’t been able to read its plans — it tends to prove itself incapable of accommodating nuance:
Industrial sensors, self-driving cars and other emerging uses of the Internet have needs that can’t be met by a general-purpose network, Ericsson Group CTO Ulf Ewaldsson said during a panel discussion. That’s driving a global discussion on a so-called “industrial Internet” alongside the regular Internet that’s grown up around the Web and other consumer activities, he said.
Regulatory efforts like the FCC’s rules don’t see a distinction, Ewaldsson said. He didn’t slam the agency for this but said the mobile industry needs to do a better job of explaining what it’s trying to do. Most importantly, it’s not trying to block or throttle people’s access to the Internet, he said.
So? Yesterday, that wasn’t a problem. Today, it is. Why? Because now there is a federal agency involved, and it has a bunch of power that it didn’t before. Good luck to Mr. Ewaldsson. Good luck to Netflix. Good luck to Google. Good luck to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Good luck to the Progressive Policy Institute. Good luck to the Internet Society. You made your bed. Now lie in it.