As telecom reform legislation moves forward, the idea of net neutrality is increasingly getting play in the blogosphere, with a lot of interesting takes on the notion that broadband providers should or should not be able to configure their networks to favor or disfavor certain kinds of services and applications. Yesterday Jim Gattuso rued the news that net neutrality regulations have resurfaced in the House bill.
Worst of all, however, there are indications that “net neutrality” regulations may be soldered on to this bill. Such regulation — which would prohibit network owners from differentiating among different types of content — would place the FCC squarely in the business of regulating the Internet. (see here and here for more about problems with net neutrality rules).
Such provisions would turn Barton’s original deregulatory intent on its head. Rather than eliminating obsolete and unneeded regulations of telecommunications, the bill would introduce new and equally unneeded regulations on the Internet. Lawmaking may be like sausage-making, but such a result would be particularly hard to digest.
Susan Crawford has an interesting essay that argues for what she calls “substrate” neutrality, contending that the idea of “network” neutrality confuses the issue. When broadband providers say they built the “network,” what they mean is that they built the infrastructure, or the substrate, Crawford says, not the services that ride over the network.
But broadband providers are trying to take that substrate or infrastructure ownership model and extend it, or vertically integrate it, into the services arena. Internet users, however, don’t give a hoot about the infrastructure. To them, the network represents activities they can engage in, such as web surfing or music listening.
The point about this ecology is that it is largely indifferent to the substrate it’s carried on. The CD is not the song. The term “network neutrality” doesn’t capture this — we should consider using “substrate neutrality” instead. Otherwise the network providers’ arguments are so easy: “But it’s our network!” they can say.
Crawford, in essence, is arguing for the “layered” model of Internet regulation, which distances the transport mechanism from the services and applications that ride over that transport layer.
The first step will need to be to conceptually separate transport from internet, substrate from content, infrastructure from applications. This is where “substrate neutrality” comes in.
The second step, which is harder, will be to assert that the public interest in protecting the property interests now held in broadband pipes is not as important as protecting public access to the internet. The unpredictability, the unknown potential of the complex non-substrate internet is good for creativity and humans in ways we cannot now count up. We just can’t do the tradeoff empirically between property and competition in this context. The non-substrate internet is incommensurable with the property interests now held in its pipes.
Mr. Blog (thanks, Andy) makes a similar point. The companies that now want to control the services riding over the Internet had nothing to do with the rise of those services.
It wasn’t the telco that gave us Internet service or access to the Internet. We purchased a normal phone line from the telco and then used a modem to let us establish a connection to an Internet service (ISP). The telco really had nothing to do with our interaction with our favorite website of the day.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:45 AM | Print | Comments (5)
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