OSNews

I fail to see your point. First of all, we have net neutrality today primarily because the telecoms were traditionally classified as "communications services" in the eyes of the FCC, which prohibited such services from prioritizing service based on the source or destination of a call. There were very justifiable exceptions made for emergency 911 services, and nobody could complain about that.

The FCC now classifies the packet networks owned by the telcos as "information services," where fewer regulations apply. Net neutrality isn't onerous new regulation, it's a restatement of previous communications regulations.

I concede that net neutrality regulations are not the best way to protect the Internet from commercial ambitions that might stifle innovation and otherwise conflict with the interests of the average user. The only way to make the telcos truly accountable to you and me is to create competition amongst carriers, but this might not be a realizable goal.

The conservatives are being too idealistic if they believe their own rhetoric. Regulation is necessary in noncompetitive markets to protect the interests of the consumer. Sadly, there are too many ultra-conservatives that have drank too much free-market Kool-Aid to believe in anti-trust policy in any form. They base their arguments on the premise that an unregulated market is necessarily a free market, when this is obviously not the case. Even more onerous is the application of classical free market theory to a market that is one of the most heavily regulated in the US.


Given the very public statements from telco execs concerning a tiered Internet, the regulatory vacuum left by the FCC, the noncompetitive nature of the telco market, the barriers to fostering competition in the telco market, and the pivotal role the Internet plays in our public discourse and services, there can be only one respectable reason to reject net neutrality: the specifics of the language and implementation of the policy.

If the conservatives want to convince average Americans that they are not selling out our interests in favor of the telco giants, they need to point to specific problems with the net neutrality legislation being considered. Rejecting the merits of enforcing a neutral Internet is plain unjustifiable. Just ask the cable companies what they think about net neutrality. They want a neutral Internet as well, but they aren't sure the legislation is the right approach.

This has nothing to do with Google and its competitors, who all support net neutrality almost as much as Google does. The point is that a big part of the reason you and I use the Internet is to use the services provided by companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, and countless others. We hurt if these companies hurt; they will have no choice to pass the cost of a premium-tier subscription on the consumer in the form of subscription fees, advertising, cross-promotion, and, if they choose not to pay, degraded service.

It's the software that matters to us, not the hardware of the Internet. If the telcos all went extinct for some reason, companies would spring up flush with venture capital to build a new network so we could continue to use the services on which we rely. If the services all went extinct, no one would care about the network infrastructure. This is the same truth that Toshiba and Sony are struggling to come to terms with right now.

So who's side are you on now, the one consisting of the services that make the Internet useful and the consumers that fund its operation, or the one consisting of the telcos that already charge twice for every bit that passes across their networks and still want more before they'll invest in the most valuable and fastest growing asset the world has ever known?