Has the War on Net Neutrality Begun?
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From BroadbandReports.com:
According to the Boston Globe, AT&T and BellSouth are furiously lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where a telco’s own traffic (and those who pay) would travel faster than competitor traffic.
The push would impact not only websites and VoIP, but also IPTV, the Globe reporting that “rival firms’ online video offerings would be transmitted at lower speed and with poorer image quality.” The telco justification is that since they’re paying so much for upgrades, their traffic should clearly have higher priority in a two-tiered system.
There is no need for the FCC to adopt rules protecting consumers’ ability to use whatever IP services they see fit, FCC chief Kevin Martin said today. “I’m hesitant to adopt rules that would prevent anti-competitive behavior where there hasn’t been significant evidence of a problem,” says Martin, just one day after the Boston Globe reported AT&T and BellSouth wanted to de-prioritize the traffic of websites, VoIP providers, and any other content carriers and competitors who didn’t pay them.
This is an issue I’ve written about extensively on this blog, as have many others. If the war has now begun, this is going to be significant. The oligipolistic utilities that have laid the pipe now appear to be attempting to lay down gates and toll booths.
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Like most of these emerging questions, this one is shaping up to be a contest of Technology vs Technology. Each kind of internet provider is going to try whatever nasty tricks are possible given their local advantages, including hardcore exploitation of monopolies. At the same time they’re fighting that battle, they’re also feeling the ground shifting under them; each new technology has a shorter window of profitability before things change again.
I’m guessing that in just a few years the debate will shift to a different plane. Bandwidth will go through the floor. There will be free wireless internet in most urban areas. That might just intensify this debate, at first, but once the bandwidth costs get low enough, it could undercut the debate. Notice how nobody is talking about how this is going to affect people’s ability to get text emails? Text is below the threshhold where this kind of game is playable right now. They’ve got to stay ahead of the curve in order to keep milking it. Right now video is still (barely) bandwidth intensive, so they’ve got a few years to make a mess (of money) there. Then it’s gone. At that point they’d better be making their money gatekeeping the bandwidth for live hi-def VR.
Who controls the nose of the curve is certainly important, but it’s also true that every information technology is going to be democratized in short order, as long as this rate of progress holds.