Net neutrality legislation--My take on it.

By Jeffrey Krauss, President of Telecommunications and Technology Policy

I've been watching the net neutrality debate recently, and it has heated up. While the goals might seem reasonable--"to keep the Internet free and open to all"--a careful review of the pending legislation paints a different picture. The bills to amend the Communications Act and the antitrust laws would stifle the technological enhancement of the Internet, to the advantage of the big guys like Google, Amazon.com , eBay and Yahoo!.

The little guys don't realize this. There's an enormous coalition supporting net neutrality, hundreds of individuals and organizations and companies that I have never heard of. But if you follow the money, you find that it's really Google, Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo! that are behind this campaign. It started out with a reasonable goal--to prohibit ISPs from blocking user access to Web sites. Never mind that there is no evidence that any ISP was blocking access. But like many Washington campaigns, it soon evolved into a straight attempt by the big guys to tilt business relationships and prevent Internet technical improvements from creating business opportunities for the little guys.

I've looked at three pending bills, and they have nearly identical language dealing with service quality. Basically, they all say that if a network operator offers an enhanced service, that enhanced service quality must be offered to all users, for no additional charge. It has the effect of prohibiting quality of service enhancements. This language appears in H.R. 5417, Congressman Sensenbrenner's bill to amend the Clayton Act antitrust laws. It appears in H.R. 5273, Congressman Markey's bill to amend the Communications Act. And it appears in S. 2917, Sen. Snowe's bill to amend the Communications Act.

So these bills would prohibit you from designing a network that recognizes VoIP traffic and gives it higher priority than Web browsing or e-mail. They would prohibit you from employing devices that recognize peer-to-peer traffic, and give it a lower priority. What? You say that your voice telephone service, which uses the PacketCable specifications designed by CableLabs, gives better quality of service control than the versions offered by Skype or Vonage? That's prohibited. Too bad!

These bills give you the right to protect network security. They give you the right to offer parental controls to block indecency, and to offer software to control spam. But they don't give you the right to use network intelligence to block spam, or to identify and control peer-to-peer traffic. In other words, Google, Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo! are perfectly happy with the way the Internet is right now, and they don't want it to get any smarter.

Maybe one of the original intentions was to prevent an ISP ...