Shilling for the Telcos

The Washington Post today published an amazingly brain-dead editorial on network neutrality, and comes squarely down on the side of the telecom companies, even to the point of using their main talking point as their sub-headline ("Congress should stay out of cyberspace."). But as bad as the conclusion is, it is a very good example of the disinformation and dishonest argumentation that characterizes the corporate side of the debate, so let's take a closer look and the Post's arguments one by one.

Point 1: Competition in the broadband market will prevent abuse:

More than 60 percent of Zip codes in the United States are served by four or more broadband providers that compete to give consumers what they want — fast access to the full range of Web sites, including those of their kids' soccer league, their cousins' photos, MoveOn.org and the Christian Coalition. If one broadband provider slowed access to fringe bloggers, the blogosphere would rise up in protest — and the provider would lose customers.

OK, so the other 40 percent is screwed, but how vibrant is the competition for the other 60% of us? I imagine that most of that 60% only see two options: the phone company and the cable company. A few will see a third — satellite. But after that, you're really talking about companies with access to someone else's network. For example, I use Speakeasy for DSL and VOIP, but all that runs through BellSouth's network. Which means that whatever BellSouth decides, I have to live with that too. So what we have isn't competition, it's oligopoly.

Point 2: Tiered service won't have much of an impact on internet innovation:

Cyber-upstarts already face barriers: The incumbents have brand recognition and invest in tricks to make their sites load faster. The extra barrier created by a lack of net neutrality would probably be small because the pipe owners know that consumers want access to innovators.

I'm not going to discount the problems that internet startups face, but the Post shouldn't discount the benefit of having equal access to consumers, in terms of speed or even availability. How successful would Google have been if the phone companies already had a profitable search service and were allowed to slow or block access to their competitors? Would YouTube have climbed to the top of the online video pile if the telcos were shipping video themselves? Let's face it — claiming that the free market will ensure equal access when you've already incentivized large established companies to discriminate for profit just isn't going to cut it. And those profits actually form the basis of the Post's next argument.

Point 3: Telcos need incentives to invest in network infrastructure:

If you want innovation on the Internet, you need better pipes: ones that are faster, less susceptible to hackers and spammers, or smarter in ways that nobody has yet thought of. The lack of incentives for pipe innovation is more pressing than the lack of incentives to create new Web services.

If we need better network tech, then we should be prepared to pay for it directly. Let's send out some NAS grant money, and let's tack on a broadband surcharge that must be used for network expansion. But no, that's too easy: according to the Post, we should come up with a scheme which doesn't actually insure that any extra network capacity will be built, and allows acceptable delivery speeds to go to the highest bidder instead of to those content and service providers chosen by consumers. Which brings us to the punchline:

The weakest aspect of the neutrality case is that the dangers it alleges are speculative. It seems unlikely that broadband providers will degrade Web services that people want and far more likely that they will use non-neutrality to charge for upgrading services that depend on fast and reliable delivery, such as streaming high-definition video or relaying data from heart monitors.

Wow, talk about speculative! What tiered service actually accomplishes is exactly the opposite — it encourages telcos to keep their networks small enough to justify the premium pricing for fast delivery. And that's the real problem here — network bandwidth is still a scarce commodity. It shouldn't be. We've reached a point where the cost of practically every other computing resource is ridiculously low — storage is pennies per GB, you can double your RAM for $50, etc. All that is good for consumers, and good for innovation. Network access should be no different, and that's only going to be possible if we begin with a commitment to network neutrality. If the network providers want to compete, that's fine — let them compete with the size and speed of their networks. It's the absolute wrong approach to allow these companies to make a healthy profit from a few large content providers while simultaneously encouraging them not to build enough capacity for everyone.