Four very smart people weigh in today with a Washington Post op-ed piece that argues against imposing net neutrality requirements on broadband providers. David Farber, professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Michael Katz, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley (and former top economist at both the FCC and DOJ), Gerald Faulhaber, a professor at the Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, and Christopher Yoo, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, argue that net neutrality laws could stiflle innovation without providing any consumer benefits.
They make a valid case that some kinds of discrimination make intuitive (and probably social and economic) sense, such as ensuring that a patient’s heart monitor gets higher priority than a music download during periods of network congestion. To bar all forms of discrimination might mean harming, not helping, consumers. It’s just not clear “to determine in advance whether a particular practice promotes or harms competition,” they write.
But they raise an analogy that actually strikes at the heart of the network neutrality debate, likening the Internet to the postal service.
Blocking premium pricing in the name of neutrality might have the unintended effect of blocking the premium services from which customers would benefit. No one would propose that the U.S. Postal Service be prohibited from offering Express Mail because a “fast lane” mail service is “undemocratic.” Yet some current proposals would do exactly this for Internet services.
Here’s the thing: people might not accuse the Postal Service of being undemocratic for offering a speedier mail option, but they sure would accuse the Postal Service of lots of things if it unilaterally started to decide which kinds of mail got delivered at what speed solely on the basis of its own economic or political benefit.
That’s what network neutrality proponents fear will happen if broadband providers are given unfettered control over the content delivered via their pipes. They only worry about the Express Mail scenario to the extent that it’s used as a pretext to actually slow down competitors or adversaries.
Moreover, the Postal Service doesn’t have the ability to easily detect the content of the packets it delivers. An envelope containing a bill looks like an envelope containing a check — both get equally zapped through the sorting machine.
But broadband providers can easily tell the difference between a VoIP packet and a text packet. Network neutrality proponents argue that AT&T, for example, might treat, and has every incentive to treat, the VoIP packet differently than it does the text packet, all else being equal — in other words, even if Express Mail options don’t come into play.
Still, I’m on the record as saying that net neutrality legislation gives me the willies, and mostly because I don’t trust the government not to screw up what is a very vibrant, yet fragile, marketplace. I agree with Farber, Katz, et. all. that “we should wait until there is a problem before rushing to enact solutions.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:37 PM|Comments(0)
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