Off the Topic

Rant Time: Network Neutrality

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 23, 2006 ⋅ Tags: capitalism, google, network neutrality, telcos, tiered internet

I’ve steered pretty clear on the network neutrality front but I’ve found myself with a bit of a time, so that can only mean it’s time for an opinionated rant. That’s really what the Internets is all about right? Briefly, for those not following this topic, network neutrality relates to the major telcos in that they wish to introduce a tiered-like internet, primarily so that they can charge companies like Google more, only because Google is generating revenue because of said telcos and their network infrastructure.

That being said, network neutrality in the context of the internet is about transport providers not creating barriers for content providers regardless of whom those content providers are. It has nothing to do with what a transport provider charges its end-user (please note that content providers are paying their own transport providers already and as a rule of thumb they are not customers of the ISP that you get your dsl/cable/dial-in connection from.

Consequently, local loop competition has everything to do with network neutrality, because if we had real competition for every house’s internet, then no one would have the ability to make ridiculous business decisions like a tiered internet or whatever they’re trying to market this week because they would have no customers. If people had real options for getting internet, this wouldn’t even be talked about because people would just switch to a service that didn’t degrade their favorite content in favor of some proprietary junk. Capitalism at its finest, really.

The issue at hand is that transport services should by definition content neutral. This is better for them and for the customer because it makes content purely a responsibility of the content provider, or in other words, doing away with network neutrality results in transport providers becoming - albeit partially - responsible for the content they carry. I leave it to your imagination what the result of that will be.

For as far as the ISP argument goes - yes, Google is making money thanks to your users, but realize you wouldn’t have paying users without such content services, in other words, you are being paid for it already by your own customers which you would not have without said content providers.

If you want to be notified the next time I write something please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!

Related Posts

• Yahoo! to Microsoft: How cheap do you think we are?
• Who wants a free Google phone?
• Well Goosh Damn, a Google Shell
• Web advertisers know what you did last summer
• Verizon to sue FCC because they can’t compete