Opinion: What's Wrong with Net Neutrality - ' Government and Technology '

Government and Technology
Assuming for the moment that net neutrality is a good idea—that it is a feature of the current Internet that adds value to the economy as a whole—how should it be preserved? Up until now, neutrality has been both a feature and a limit of the packet-switching architecture of the TCP/IP protocol—one, however, that cable providers have long worked around. (If you get Internet access through cable, the provider already prioritizes the high-bandwidth activity of program delivery, which is why cable providers are currently arguing against net neutrality.)

If the fears of neutrality advocates—that broadband providers will break with tradition in ways contrary to their own long-term interests—are well-founded, how should we stop them?. The free-market types, such as Steve Forbes, argue that consumers will vote with their wallets and avoid providers who unfairly "discriminate."

If, however, the choices for broadband provisioning are limited to one or two providers (as they are in many parts of the U.S.), the market may not work. All the net neutrality advocates want is legislation that preserves the status quo—a needed protection against possible market failure.

On the surface, this sounds like a fairly minimal intrusion on an otherwise well-functioning market, one unlikely to add new costs of its own to enforce. Just forbid the phone companies from changing their technical architecture, in other words—something the companies insist they don't plan to do anyway.

But is law the answer? Under the proposed Internet Freedom Preservation Act, to pick just one example, the definition of "neutrality" goes on for several hundred words, and the implementing "rules" are left to the FCC to define. How would the FCC ensure that broadband providers stay neutral? Would consumers complain about individual violations, as with the Do Not Call list? Would the FCC set up compliance monitoring of network traffic? Since the practice to be banned is largely theoretical, and based on technology yet to be developed, the likelihood of accurately defining what is illegal is very low, and the chances of inadvertently encouraging inefficient workarounds high. The market hasn't even failed yet. How can we correct it?

The net neutrality "crisis," I predict, will reach a crescendo in the next few months, then quickly disappear without any resolution. Which is just as well. But until we confront the underlying legal issues gumming up the information industries, we'll just keep spinning our wheels.