Not neutrality
p2pnet.net news:- Hal Singer of the Financial Post has gone as far as to simply make stuff up to justify his opposition to network neutrality laws. You can see this in his personal definition of Net Neutrality.
Although the idea has taken on many meanings, net neutrality is fundamentally about denying a voluntary exchange between two consenting parties for the sake of equal outcomes. The argument goes something like this: If my Web site cannot afford certain bells and whistles to make real-time applications run better, then my rivals should be prevented by law from purchasing those enhancements from any broadband service provider.
He claims those who support Net Neutrality are rent-seekers, when in fact the opposite is true. Here’s one of many problems with a non-neutral network: the current “owners” of the underlying network infrastructure want to charge additional rents for this service. Manipulating the supply for something where demand is only increasing, they’ve over-subscribed customers to the extent there’s network congestion. They now want to charge more for this scarce resource, prioritizing the traffic of those who pay above the regular bandwidth costs.
This is not “bells and whistles”, but basic provision of service where the current owners have created a problem only they can solve, and who are now selling a “solution” (packet shaping).
I’m not calling it a “protection racket”, but the business model is very similar.
There are two possible solutions: regulating against this abusive rent-seeking through Net Neutrality rules; or, forcing a market separation between companies who provide the “last mile” and those who provide any additional services (creating a competitive marketplace where one currently does not exist). The status-quo is already failing, and if allowed to continue, will kill all Internet-dependant markets – including those Hal Singer falsely claims to be supporting.
The definition Mr Singer made up is laughable. The Internet became as useful as it is today specifically because endpoints in a communication could make voluntary agreements without additional permission or payment of an intermediary. For the innovation of the Internet to be possible, the network providers must be acting as a utility equally for all endpoints in the network, not as a strategic partner of a small subset of possible destinations that will obviously harm competition.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, has been speaking out on this issue, stating, “When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. “
It seems there’s a small number of Canadian lobbyists who, on behalf of the incumbent cable and telephone companies, want to end this innovation in Canada.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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March 29th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Here’s an interesting example of how the principles of Net Neutrality can be linked back to the Internet’s older brother, the telecom network. A few weeks ago, AT&T began blocking calls to services like FreeConferenceCall.com. AT&T did this without filing a direct lawsuit, without petitioning the FCC and without even contacting Free Conferencing Corp, the parent company. These types of free services are completely legal and AT&T is using self-help and cowboy justice to financially bully competing services out of business. This is the world of Carrier Neutrality. You can learn more at blog.freeconferencecall.com.