Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth–the capacity to move information–as we do on energy. Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.
The Internet was in crisis. Its electronic “pipes” were clogged with new bandwidth-hogging software. Engineers faced a choice: Allow the Net to succumb to fatal gridlock or find a solution. The year was 1987. About 35,000 people, mainly academics and some government employees, used the Internet.
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The Telecommunications and Internet subcommittee of the the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing today on H.R. 5353, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008. The bill would establish an official national broadband policy, one that prevents service providers from subjecting lawful content to “unreasonable interference” or “discrimination.” It also calls on the Federal Communications Commission to assess competition in and consumer access to broadband Internet access in light of this policy. The testimony at the hearing, however, suggested that these provisions, and net neutrality in general, mean very different things to different groups. And, as far as the RIAA is concerned, Net neutrality legislation could hamstring the fight against piracy.
I hate to break this to you and risk damaging the relationship of trust and faith that you have with your cable company, but according to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Comcast has not been totally forthright in describing its handling of bandwidth-sucking BitTorrent transfers of large media files. Ever since it was caught using surreptitious, hacker-like techniques to interrupt such activity, the cable giant has claimed that it was simply exercising sound network management practices to ensure decent service for all, and that the throttling was applied only in times of high network congestion. Tuesday, Martin told a Senate committee that his agency’s ongoing investigation indicated otherwise.
Now we know why none of the major carriers showed up for Thursday’s open FCC meeting at Stanford University: Who wants to take on Larry Lessig, the lion of Net neutrality, in his own den?
There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. It’s being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being third world by international broadband standards to top of the charts and exemplary. Make this change and Net neutrality becomes a non-issue. There is plenty of bandwidth for everyone. What is the dirty little secret ?
Last November, Jeff Richards, VP of VeriSign’s Digital Content Services, suggested to me that “Net neutrality” would be the hottest broadband video topic in 2008. I was skeptical, believing that this was a classic “solution in search of a problem” and that yet again this topic would fail to gain traction among regulators and policy-makers. Based on events of the past week, it looks like Jeff may be right and I may be wrong.
I tend to be skeptical when people start screaming “net neutrality” when it’s not warranted, but here’s a situation where it may be worth asking a few questions. We’ve been wondering for some time why AT&T would agree to help NBC try to block the transfer of any unauthorized content on its network. It made very little sense at the time. AT&T (in its previous versions) had actually been one of the big proponents of the “safe harbor” clause in the DMCA that meant it didn’t need to police the content on its own network. So why would it suddenly, voluntarily, be saying it wants to spend time, money and energy in an impossible effort to police the content shared across its own network?
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