IP Democracy: Susan Crawford: Focus on Facilities-Based Competition

As Cynthia notes, comments by SBC CEO Ed Whitacre quoted in Business Week have triggered strong reactions from within the ranks of net-neutrality advocates, with some describing as extortion Whitacre’s assertion that “there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?…for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

While a techdirt post takes this tack, it also notes that “the only reason this is possible now is because there’s less competition in the broadband space, not more. If there were real competition, SBC would never even dare to suggest that they might cut off a Google, Yahoo or Vonage.”

Susan Crawford suggests that the fight for network neutrality may be a losing one and that a better strategy is to push for policies that promote facilities-based competition and give end users more choices in terms of broadband access networks.

To talk in response about the glories of the end-to-end principle and the importance of facilitating end-user choice sounds weak. All we’re saying is that we like the norms of our network better then the norms of their network. They have invested $1.1 billion over the last few years in lobbying designed to support their network.

I don’t think the fight over “network neutrality” is one we’re going to win. We need to find higher ground. I think the real fight should be over rights of way and platform competition. There’s a clear lack of competition in the last mile — that’s where choice has to exist, and it doesn’t now…If the FCC is getting in the way of cross-platform competition, we need to fix that. In a sense, we need to look down — at the relationship between the provider and the customer — rather than up at the relationship between the provider and the bits it agrees to carry or block.

Competition in the market for pipes has to be the issue to focus on, not the neutrality of those pipes once they have been installed. We’ll always lose when our argument sounds like asking a regulator to shape the business model of particular companies.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on October 31, 2005 12:49 PM to IP Democracy