Just a few months ago, network neutrality was a fairly esoteric subject confined mostly to technology bloggers.

Overnight, it seems, calls for enforced network neutrality reached a fever pitch and are finding their way onto editorial pages and political websites everywhere.

MoveOn.org is convinced that without network neutrality, the end of the Internet is at hand. Popular musicians like Moby and Michael Stipe have lent their voices to the cause, exhorted breathlessly at www.savetheinternet.com. In the Senate, efforts to insert network neutrality language into a pending telecom reform bill are holding up passage of the measure, despite the bi-partisan defeat of a net neutrality amendment to a companion reform bill in the House of Representatives.

A network neutrality policy would prevent the nation’s broadband service providers, namely the telephone and cable companies like AT&T and Comcast, and Internet service providers (ISPs) like EarthLink and AOL, from selectively blocking customer access to Web sites and Web-based applications, such as voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP). It would also require these companies to treat all digital information the same way as it moves across their networks. So-called Internet ‘toll lanes’ would be prohibited. Service providers would not be allowed to charge an added fee to enhance or guarantee the quality of content of an application a third party wants to provide.

Unfortunately Moveon.org, Moby and other supporters of network neutrality display a terrible misunderstanding of both Internet business models and the growing sophistication of integrated applications that use these broadband pipes.

First, none of the large phone companies or cable companies or Internet service providers has ever made it a business policy to block access to web sites or any part Web application. The one case where it happened, Madison River Communications, a small ISP in North Carolina, which tried to block Vonage, was fined by the FCC and ordered to stop.

The second aspect of the net neutrality, that demands phone and cable companies treat all data the same as it crosses their networks, is disingenuous. It sounds fair, but the problem is, we’re at a point where there are Web applications and content that need to be treated differently in order to work properly for the user. It isn’t so much about slow and fast lanes as it is about who pays the cost of the management and optimisation these sophisticated applications will require.

Phone and cable companies have said that it should be the companies like Google, eBay, Amazon.com and the major studios that are going to create these management strains to begin with. That rather logical proposition is giving some senators fits.

Instead, they are siding with Google and the other big Web content and applications companies who, under a network neutrality regime, would be able to avoid responsibility for the added costs of providing their bandwidth-intensive services - on which they aim to make sizable profits. This is supposed to be fair and egalitarian?

What service providers want to offer third party applications providers is more like ‘good, better and best’. Network neutrality, however, insists on a zero-sum view. Better quality for one means worse quality for another. But that’s silly. For example, overnight delivery recognises the mission-critical needs of some shipments. Yet overnight delivery does not diminish standard three-day service. The same shippers, in fact, use both services, depending on specific requirements. If we were to apply the principle of ‘neutrality’ in package delivery, it wouldn’t change three-day service, all it would do would lock it in and prohibit anything faster.

When Disney/Pixar wants use the Internet to deliver Cars in high-definition, six-channel stereo DVD quality, the enormous video, audio and control codes cross the networks require a high level of real time, error-free transmission. If service providers can’t recover this cost from content providers, they must spread it among all users. It means one-hour-a-day surfers pay the cost of servicing 24/7 bandwidth maniacs.

Meanwhile, billion-dollar companies, with a government-granted exemption to the law of supply and demand, will simply take the network resources they need. Today, Microsoft’s Internet computing effort is based on 200,000 Web servers (the computers that store Web content, applications and programming), according to the New York Times. The same report estimates that Google maintains more than 450,000 servers. The so-called ‘little guys’, who share a hard drive on an lone server somewhere and simply need to get data from point A to point B and whom net neutrality aims to protect, will be run off the information highway for want of effective prioritisation methods that will allow their Internet data to run alongside more demanding applications.

Congress needs to grasp the implication of enshrining network neutrality into law. It amounts to significant government interference in the market for management of sophisticated bandwidth services and applications. It’s based on wrong perceptions, wrong assumptions and, if it goes through, will be bad for everyone.
Steven Titch,
Senior Fellow IT and Telecom Policy
The Heartland Institute.