This Week In Net Neutrality: The Good, the Bad, and the Stupid

Anyone who’s ever read more than a handful of my articles knows that I am in love with Net Neutrality, the principle that Internet Service Providers, governments, and other power players in the ‘net landscape should not selectively disallow various content or protocols. As the last week has contained a lot of landmarks for Net Neutrality, I thought it would be nice to take a look back.

This past Friday, a federal appeals court made it known that it “likely would reject the FCC’s authority to sanction Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer applications.” This is the latest in Comcast’s battle with the FCC essentially over whether or not Comcast can selectively throttle peer-to-peer traffic on its networks. In short, Comcast are being a bunch of money-grubbers who are claiming that peer-to-peer traffic takes up too much bandwidth. Comcast frequently hides behind a facade stating that P2P is a method for spreading copyrighted materials illegally, but the company’s throttling is unable to only target illegal content; therefore Comcast ruins one’s ability to download even legal materials via P2P.

That said, the appeals court is right on with this one. I say this because the FCC is yet to actually have any strict power allowing it to govern Net Neutrality. Julius Genachowski, the FCC chairman, says that he is “confident the commission possesses the legal authority it needs,” but right now that’s simply not true. As a general rule, I’d much prefer that courts do not allow branches of the government to impose whatever rules they want on private entities. Violating that principle would lead to all sorts of nasty, Orwellian consequences.

But the FCC might soon have the power it believes itself to already have. The Commission recently approved a proposal which would firmly require ISPs to abide by principles of Net Neutrality. Like anything new done in government, don’t expect the FCC to become a cyber hero overnight: the Commission is currently taking public comments on the proposed regulatory powers, and many expect Net Neutrality regulations to be challenged in court.

Already John McCain has shown himself as an enemy of the proposal. Senator McCain has introduced a bill which would “stop the FCC’s rules from coming to fruition.” He claims that Net Neutrality as the FCC desires it will “stifle innovation, in turn slowing our economic turnaround and further depressing an already anemic job market.”

Rather than simply giving Senator McCain a verbal pummeling, I will counter his points with facts. A study from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity warns that without firm, enforceable Net Neutrality rules, “new technologies could lead to pricing practices that transfer wealth from content providers to ISPs” (you can find the full report here as a PDF). If ISPs are not subject to Net Neutrality, the IPI’s cost-benefit analysis finds that content providers would end up paying ISPs for “priority subscriber access,” meaning that content producers such as Randall Munroe of XKCD would have to pay ISPs more for them to not slow traffic to his site. The IPI goes further, stating that this sort of mafia-reminiscent model

would reduce the return on investment for Internet content—meaning website owners, bloggers, newspapers, and businesses would have less incentive to expand their sites and applications… Smaller websites might not be able to afford the fees leading them to close up shop. Start-ups might not actually start up because it costs too much or the profits aren’t worth the investment. If too many sites decide it’s just not worth the price of entry, the Internet loses value to the people who use it.

Despite his convictions, Senator McCain is just plain wrong on how Net Neutrality may affect the economy: if anything, it will allow for better economics (I suspect that Senator McCain has other interests behind his proposed bill).

So there you have it. All in all, this past week has been quite good. The IPI’s study is the most important new development in a very long time as it is firm research from a disinterested party on the benefits of Net Neutrality. And the FCC’s approval of the Net Neutrality proposal is a very big step in the right direction; with any luck, ISPs like Comcast will not be legally able to throttle traffic anymore.