The Network Neutrality debate is, to understate it, heated. On one side are ideals, on the other side is money, which is not a new dichotomy in any sense, and both can be equally powerful motivators*. Also, while passion tends to color an issue (sometimes incorrectly), economic theory tends to mire subscribers in stubborn dogma.
Neither side wants to budge for fear of losing, or for fear of the embarrassment of choosing the wrong team.
Net Neutrality champ Lawrence Lessig spoke at the FCC hearing at Stanford last week and clarified an issue many may have not known was an issue. Lessig testified that ISPs having different pricing plans for various levels of access, e.g., charging differently for 5 Mbps and 10 Mbps, wasn’t a Net Neutrality concern.
That’s an important clarification, and one that many may not have thought to make. ISPs have always charged for various levels of service, and have a right to do so. We might (and should) criticize them for wasting a $200 billion Congressional gift on long distance instead of broadband upgrades, for putting the country on the gradual-upgrade-maximized-profit road, or for waltzing in the same market manipulation dance big oil, pharma, and insurance companies like to engage in. But regulating at the access point does seem overly restrictive. You wouldn’t make a retailer charge the same for rayon as they would for cashmere, right?
What spooked people in the beginning was not pricing plans for various speed levels at the access point, but BellSouth and AT&T’s stated intention of double-dipping inside the pipes. Though companies and organizations already pay for the bandwidth they use, these now re-merged giants want the right to, as they put it, accept payment from Yahoo to have its homepage load faster than Google’s on subscriber computers.
Thus, the alarms went off everywhere. If you’re a startup or a nonprofit and can’t pony up, good luck getting your foot in the Internet’s door. As reported here in the past, you have four seconds to get your page loaded before visitors start to bail. ISPs want to use the free market argument, but there is no free market when consumers have a choice of one, maybe two providers. Consumers who don’t like AT&T’s interference with non-preferred companies, websites, or message-creators could sometimes, if available in their area, switch to Comcast, where last-century networks are clogged to the point they have to block peer-to-peer and degrade high definition channels just to make room, or else follow Time Warner’s lead by going 90’s retro and charging per minute again.
Verizon assistant vice president Link Hoewing weighed in again on the debate yesterday, giving some background on historical network troubles and how the market has corrected them on its own:
“I know some believe that things are different today but I think a lot of this is due to the demonizing that has crept in on both sides of the debate. I believe that most of the players still have strong incentives to work together while they also in some arenas compete. Government, industry and academics – as well as individuals – all worked together over the last two decades to make things work and to help the Internet evolve. Government was involved too but not in a formal, highly regulatory way.
“I feel that this flexible, cooperative, competitive, adaptive model will get lost if government plays more and more of a regulatory role.”
You’d be right to note that Hoewing as a stake in the debate by being a Verizon executive, but so does everybody else, wherever they’re coming from. The truth is, though, that Hoewing’s argument made sense ten years ago, when conservative free market arguments made more sense in general, before the greed of multinational corporations became more apparent, before it seemed they had better access to the government’s ear than the people had, before it became obvious there is no free market anymore, before the information age really began to sink in at a public-level, before the people had stopped trusting the lot of them.
Trust, then, not demonizing, is more at the heart of this issue. It is different these days. The people would be glad to ascribe to a free market dogma, if only the market were free, if only the companies still pounding the free market drum could be trusted with the free market. But these same companies have done little to earn that trust, and have in fact done just the opposite. As big oil gouges us and the government rewards them, as insurance companies look for every way to keep from holding up their end of the bargain, as mortgage companies are bailed out while the people’s troubles are ignored, as AT&T states its intention to squeeze Internet companies while earning its get-out-jail-free card from Capitol Hill via domestic spying (prevention from packet manipulation could prevent them also from snooping on behalf of the government and the MPAA), as Verizon blocks text messages and hands our paid-for-by-the-minute mobile numbers over to telemarketers, as Comcast interferes with peer-to-peer, as they take tax breaks and never give back to the people, as the world blazes past us in broadband speeds, what is it exactly that they have done to convince the people they should be trusted with one of the most important and equalizing developments in the history of mankind?
What our mothers taught us when we were teenagers is that trust is a very fragile thing. You earn trust the first time easily, but if you break that trust, it is much harder (nearly impossible) to earn it back. When they do something to earn our trust, we might give it back to them, but they’ll have to do a better job of convincing us.
*Yes, all you annoying realists, money often proves more powerful.
