Net Neutrality, not Net Stupidity0
JR posted in Web news on June 5th, 2007
George Ou, on ZDNet’s blogs, has an interesting article titled: “A rational debate on Net Neutrality“. In it, he makes excellent points about how the debate and proposed legislation regarding Net Neutrality are not always well thought out.
He rightly points out that when most people think of Net Neutrality, they are thinking about avoiding what he calls “off-ramp” prioritization. He labels the proposals from AT&T’s Ed Whitacre about charging Internet destination sites (like Amazon or Google) for access to AT&T’s customers as being foolish. He feels that the Internet destination sites have more power to punish a company that attempts to demand payment for access to their subscribers because if they cut off that access (or even degrade that access), the customers would rightly complain to the ISP.
Rather than mandate a strict net neutrality, he proposes to make illegal the deliberate degradation of traffic below “best traffic” service. Responding to the argument that this is a subtle and difficult to detect activity, he proposes that the fine for such be made very large (he named it a million dollars) and that a whistleblower receive half the fine as a reward for cooperating with government investigators. An engineer or auditor would have to know about the degradation and would therefore be strongly motivated to turn it over to the government.
Though he does not think that this is needed at this time, he feels that at most there would be an argument for a law against offering prioritization services to companies not directly connected to that service provider.
His statements reveal an excellent knowledge of the the way the Internet has worked to date and a balanced way of handling the increasing need for a means of handling the need for some means of handling the flood of traffic that video and other high-bandwidth services will demand.