Paul Kapustka's Blog

Going to have to disagree with you on this one, Paul.

The rhetoric on this issue is amazing. What Google and others are pushing for is actually MORE REGULATION. The internet was founded on light or no regulation and many of these companies wouldn't even exist if more regulations were put on the Internet in its infancy. How many times has a service provider actually abused its power of access to cause all this "sky is falling" rhetoric? Exactly once. And the FCC quickly acted. Google, EBay and others are BILLION dollar companies and want to the government to REGULATE in order to give them an advantage. The service providers are simply saying "let the market decide." Isn't the market a better place for the Internet to flourish than Washington, DC? (All due respect, of course, to Washington - which is a great city).

Sorry John, your view is pretty simplistic. The Internet wouldn't be as open as it is today without the common carrier rules -- see Susan Crawford's blog for an excellent FAQ that deflates your claims a lot better than I can here. Net neutrality isn't about new regulation, it's about keeping the old, necessary regulations in place to ensure that everyone can play, and not just BILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES (your emphasis) like AT&T and Verizon, who have the money to buy those BILLION DOLLAR ROUTERS (my emphasis) that Cisco sells.

And sure there's only been one instance of net neutrality violations, one that can be proven. But without service providers giving consumers accurate transparency into the services they buy, who knows how those service providers are using all that excellent Cisco gear to partition bandwidth resources? Is Cisco willing to make such statistics part of each router it sells?

For those of us with a longer memory, we can recall all the fines the telcos paid for violating the line-sharing laws they were working so hard to repeal. Ask any former employee of Covad, Rhythms Networks or Northpoint if there haven't been any past "abuses of power."

I do agree that the market would be a great place to decide where the Internet should flourish, but first we have to make sure that the telco lobbyists don't spread their astroturf FUD so thick that lawmakers can't figure out what is real and what's not. It'd be more of a fair fight if the telcos left it to the market and not to their lobbyists. But to suggest otherwise is to not understand who controls Congress from a communications point of view.

Common carrier rules never had anything to say about layer 3 capabilities. All that was ever required was the offering of a layer 2 access service. Which means that the common carrier rules never prevented any broadband providers from deploying QoS or any other layer 3 network management technique.

The only possible connection between the common carrier rules and net neutrality would be if the elimination of those rules had some material impact on competition in broadband markets. In that circumstance one might be able to argue that the elimination of those rules could lead to anti-competitive actions at layer 3 by reducing broadband competition. But since entities like Earthlink never got more than a minuscule market share via ILEC-provided DSL transport, the elimination of common carrier rules could not have a material impact on broadband competition.