Recently, Google has been accused of abandoning the cause of net neutrality. The New York Times hosted an excellent “Room for Debate” on the subject earlier this week, which featured a number of apocalyptic pronouncements as well as wise words from Princeton’s Ed Felten:
The question is not whether we want to keep this open, neutral Internet — we do, or should — but whether government rulemaking can give us the result we want. “Neutrality” is easy to envision but difficult to define precisely. Network operators need reasonable leeway to manage their networks. We don’t want to mistake their complex but neutral network management practices for actual discrimination; nor do we want to enable subtle discrimination cloaked in network jargon. Whether government can police this boundary effectively is a question we can’t hope to resolve here.
I’ll just note that Google official line on wireless net neutrality, as stated by Richard Whitt, sounds fairly persuasive. Why insist on net neutrality regulations for wireline but not for wireless services?
First, the wireless market is more competitive than the wireline market, given that consumers typically have more than just two providers to choose from. Second, because wireless networks employ airwaves, rather than wires, and share constrained capacity among many users, these carriers need to manage their networks more actively. Third, network and device openness is now beginning to take off as a significant business model in this space.In our proposal, we agreed that the best first step is for wireless providers to be fully transparent with users about how network traffic is managed to avoid congestion, or prioritized for certain applications and content.
It is the prospect of a broader retreat from the public Internet that I find more worrisome.
At Epicenter, Eliot Van Buskirk offered a different approach to net neutrality:
The Google-Verizon approach purports to keep the current internet “open” and, in fact, would codify in law, for the first time, the notion that all bits on the wired internet should be treated equally, regardless of their origin or destination. Exceptions to those non-discrimination rules would include spam, malware, viruses — and wireless data networks, where net neutrality would not apply under the Google-Verizon proposal.
That proposal’s legion of detractors say building a second, faster internet to deliver premium services would ghetto-ize the current internet. That, they charge, will freeze innovation and, over time, render the “open” internet slow, irrelevant and old by comparison — good only for painstakingly researching pre-2010 culture.
The answer to all of this could be simple: let ISPs prioritize content where doing so makes its customers happy — just don’t let them charge when they do it. Removing financial incentives to mess with the internet could help mitigate the unseen consequences of whatever tampering is soon to happen, like it or not.
I’m eager to hear what Tim Lee, author of “The Durable Internet,” thinks. Unfortunately, Tim is working for one of the major players for the summer, so I imagine we’ll have to wait.