Mike McCurry on Net Neutrality
tags:
Stumble This"Mike McCurry, co-Chair of the telecom-backed Hands off the Internet campaign debated Paul Misener, Vice President for Global Public Policy at Amazon.com on the issue of net neutrality and government regulation of internet service providers at George Washington University.
Watch Mike McCurry make remarks on opposing net neutrality" [/yt]
Watch Mike McCurry make remarks on opposing net neutrality" [/yt]
My take on this is that there are three aspects of net-neutrality that should be dealt with separately:
1. Protections against censorship (filtering traffic based on the subject matter of its content).
2. Protections against central control of application usage (prioritizing traffic based on the application generating the traffic).
3. Protections against monopolization of bandwidth (prioritizing traffic based on an artificial fee-based schedule).
I see #1 as being an obvious right drawn from the 1st amendment, and I'm glad to see at least some recognition from this opposing view that recognizes that.
I see #2 as being a less obvious right drawn from the 1st amendment, but that there are many practical caveats that make it likely we should not give this right an absolute protection. Specifically, some applications need to be low-latency (such as video games), and should get priority over others, while other applications such as bittorrent downloads can be high-latency, but should be able to achieve high-bandwidth. I think this should be legal, though I do think it needs to be regulated to only allow prioritization, not bandwidth-capping, such as what Comcast has/had been doing with Bittorrent.
#3 I think should be absolutely resisted at every turn, and attempts to entangle it with #1 and #2 are deceptive (and done by the speaker in this video). His analogy with priority mail is incorrect -- we already have tiering of available bandwidth (there are 5 different "tiers" from my cable modem provider, for instance). What telecomm companies want to do is be able to sell a service that will allow one customer's traffic to get higher priority at the giant network hubs -- equivalent to power companies letting some customers "prioritize" their electrical service, so that if there's a shortage, lower-tier customers lose power first.
It's not a healthy way to structure things, and somehow we've built electrical distribution systems, and water distribution systems without the need for that type of tiering. I don't see any value added by allowing it for internet bandwidth, beyond the ability for NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX (or other equivalent types of entities) to buy up all the bandwidth to monopolize the ability to distribute information, to keep the same top-down media hierarchy we've had during the 20th century.
I'm all for modifying net neutrality to allow for #2, as long as it's truly of benefit to the customer, and not being used as an end-runs around #1 or #3.
Banning it entirely though, is something we obviously shouldn't be considering.