Opinion: The FCC's move toward network neutrality will help ensure a level playing field and keep huge ISPs and media behemoths from casually crushing innovative small and midsize Internet companies.
bMighty networking columnist and blogger Paul Korzeniowski makes some good points in his column about network neutrality. But I believe he gets a couple of things backwards, and overall, his conclusions are dead wrong.
Net neutrality isn't a threat to small and midsize businesses, it's their best hope for protection from predatory practices by Comcast and other giant ISPs who want to control not just bandwidth but quality of service to favor their own content and those of their partners who can afford to pay big bucks for the privilege.
Point: Net Neutrality Is BAD For SMBs
First of all, let's be clear about why this is more than an academic issue.
The Comcast brouhaha wasn't just because the company tried to charge extra for additional bandwidth. Instead, the company was intentionally degrading service for peer-to-peer Internet sites and FTP and Lotus Notes -- and claimed that it did so only to manage traffic overloads, but even the Bush administration found that Comcast blocked that traffic at all times, even when there was plenty of bandwidth available and network congestion wasn't an issue.
The bottom line, it's not the amount of bandwidth at issue here. It's that Comcast and other ISPs want to be able to control what kinds of content and traffic can use that bandwidth, giving priority to some types of traffic and blocking or restricting others.
Paul Korzeniowski refers to Comcast and other ISPs as "carriers," like telephony carriers. That suggests an analogy that sheds some light on the real danger here. What if a telephone carrier -- AT&T, for example's sake -- made it easy to call other AT&T subscribers, but delayed or blocked communications from Verizon or Sprint users? Or required them to pay a fee to get the same level of access service that AT&T gives its own customers.
Well, that's essentially what Net Neutrality seeks to prevent. You see, Comcast isn't just an ISP. It's also a telephone company, a cable TV service, and -- critically -- a content provider. All those local sports channels it owns create a lot of that HD content Korzeniowski worries about. And what this is really all about is using control of the Internet pipes to favor that content over content created by competitors. Or, at the very least, using that control to demand high fees from anyone who wants the same level of service that Comcast can give to its own content.
That won't hurt Google, or even or Craigslist. They're already established, well known, and rich enought to be able to afford to pay. But what about a scrappy new startup that wants to stream sports video over the Net? What happens to them when a Comcast customer decides to check it out and discovers that while the content may be great, it seems to come in much more slowly than that Comcast's sports content? (This has already come up, as Vonage felt compelled to strike a deal with Comcast to make sure its traffic was handled properly.)
Net Neutrality is about separating control of the plumbing -- the actual network -- from control over the kind of traffic that flows through it. And most observers believe Net Neutrality is good news for smaller companies.
Will doing that stifle investment in the network? Hard to say. Comcast and other ISPs will still be free to charge pretty much whatever they want from customers. It's just that the ISPs won't be able to get it from the other end as well -- the sites those customers are visiting. And the ISPs can still meter bandwidth on the user side -- just not selectively based on the type of traffic. (Of course, metering bandwidth raises other issues. Would you watch that video or read that blog if it might cost you extra on your Internet bill -- and you didn't know how much extra?)
Finally, network investment in the U.S. already lags other nations. We get by with 1.5Mbps to 10Mbps, while the Koreans and Japanese zip along at 50Mbps or more -- largely because their governments have invested in network infrastructure as a matter of national competitiveness. In early 2008, Comcast promised to deliver 100Mbps service before 2009 rolled around. We're still waiting.
Network Neutrality remains a bit of a fuzzy concept, with various levels of neutrality under discussion. And the FCC's new approach to it may not be perfect. But if there's "wrongheaded, bureaucratic... meddling" going on here, it's not "governmental," it's coming from the ISPs who are overstepping their bounds.
See more columns by Fredric Paul
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Fredric Paul is publisher/editor-in-chief of bMighty.com and SmallBizResource.com.
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