Comments Elsewhere

Jason,

The short answer on “What’s all the fuss about?” is that two corporate coalitions are crashing into each other in the regulatory arena. Big Internet providers — the telcos and the cable companies mainly — want the ability to ration or charge extra for access to their bandwidth. Big Internet content companies, especially those such as Google, Yahoo, and Vonage, who are rolling out bandwidth-intensive products — want to be able to force the bandwidth providers to carry their services. Since they’re both pouring a lot of money into their P.R. fronts, and the “Net Neutrality” types can enlist the aid of a lot of the trade press, it’s resulted in a lot of noise over what’s really a pretty sordid tussle over just who gets to hold the captured agency.

Stephen,

Carriers could in theory cut all kinds of crazy deals with providers. What if Comcast cut a deal to replace half the normal channels with Animal Planet for a week? What if the USPS had Netflix and WalMart offer bids and did faster deliveries for all the DVDs from the higher bidder? What if UPS cut a deal with Amazon to deliver all their packages twice as fast as their competitors’? I don’t know, but there are pretty strong incentives not to engage in this kind of dickery. Of course, most carrier services that are able to, do have tiered cost structures for different levels of service (first-class/coach; Express/Priority/first-class/media/bulk, etc.). But the tiers are generally based on how much you’re willing to pay for the premium carriage, not who you are or where you’re coming from.

You’re right that we’re very far from a free market in the telecom industry, and that as a result broadband Internet is clutched in the fists of a corporate oligopoly. But since government-granted monopolies and FCC regulation are what created the oligopoly in the first place, it seems like the obvious solution is to stop protecting the monopolies and roll back the regulation, not to add more regulation in the attempt to calculate the “right” level of Internet service. If providers are damaging the network, the thing to do is to let entrepreneurs get in there and route around the damage.

As far as transparency goes, it’s pretty easy, actually, to find out where the problem is: just give a ring to a buddy of yours who doesn’t use the same ISP and see if she is having the same problem. If behind-the-scenes dickery becomes a common practice from ISPs, it would not be hard to create services that automate this process and aggregate the results, so that people can find out which providers are being dicks and which aren’t. If a noisy enough minority of customers make it clear that this kind of behavior is unacceptable then companies will, by and large, not do it, or will provide ways around it. If customers don’t care enough about it to do anything about it, well, it’s probably not much of a problem to begin with.