PJ Media

I agree with Steve’s entire article, except for his main point.

Net Neutrality means that ISP’s cannot discriminate between TCP packets based on their content. This is important for a couple reasons:

Contrary to what Steve argues, ISP’s have already been engaged in the kind of bad behavior that he claims hasn’t surfaced. Comcast, for example, has interfered with BitTorrent traffic. ISP’s are coming under strong pressure from the RIAA, MPAA and the government to use “deep packet inspection” to essentially engage in wholesale wiretapping. Time Warner was recently identified as having blocked political messages that they found overly controversial.

There are very few top-tier ISP’s at the moment. While you can pick lots of brand names these days, the reality is that most of them are RESELLERS of the same small list of broadband services. (example: Name four DSL providers in your area. They ALL resell the same phone company service. It feels like competition because you have different branding, but the reason the services are all so similar is because the core product is exactly the same.) They, in turn, use a very small number of companies for their internet backbones.

The key risk from government control comes from QoS policies that Net Neutrality would prevent. With so few ISP’s out there, it is very easy for the government to regulate what can and can’t happen on the internet without resorting to legislation by collaborating with the ISP’s.

The camel’s nose is already in the tent, in the form of extensive ISP-government collaboration. The government achieves its national security goals and criminal justice goals, and the ISP gets the lever it needs to prioritize, throttle or shut down entirely applications at its whim.

For a similar situation, look at our voice networks. I’ve been working in mobile applications development for nearly ten years now. Whether you’re using Mobitex, BREW or even a wireless web application, unless you had special connections with a carrier, your application would be blocked by the network, or rendered so inaccessible as to be effectively blocked. The networks claimed they were doing this to ensure Quality of Service, but the real reason was control. They’re doing the exact same thing here, in the name of freedom– but as in the past, as soon as they have the precedents set that they want, they’ll be back in bed with whatever agencies they need to ensure their oligopoly.

There is a very good reason that conservative and libertarian programmers and net admins favor net neutrality. The moment the carriers develop the infrastructure to discriminate between packets, they’ll offer that capability as a service to the government (ours, and any others that they operate in).