Interesting bit of political framing here:

Put another way, if net neutrality passes, the AT&Ts of the world will be forced to pay for all of their equipment upgrades themselves and could not subsidize that effort by imposing premium fees for premium services. If net neutrality fails, they will be able to recoup more of those costs than they can now from the likes of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and other major users of the World Wide Web.

At its heart, then, the battle is commercial — over who pays how much for improvements to the Internet that we all use and sometimes love.

No Neutral Ground in This Internet Battle By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum Washington Post Monday, June 26, 2006; Page D01

I’d be more willing to believe that if the various incumbent carriers or their predecessors hadn’t already been promising us fast broadband for everyone for many years now, and if Japan and Korea hadn’t already managed it without this kind of finagle.

Birnbaum makes several points, including this one:

Second, online firms already pay billions of dollars to network operators. The quandary is, should they be assessed more for additional or premium services, such as video streaming?

Hm, so why was it that when the World Wide Web came out around 1995, despite all the complaints about it using far more bandwidth than other applications and doing so in an ill-bred manner (web browsers started opening 4 or more TCP connections simultaneously), why was it that instead of extra charges being required, lots more people got connected and used the Internet more, producing a great buildout that has lasted through the dot com boom and bust, producing the Internet as we know it today?

Birnbaum’s basic complaint seems to be that television ads about net neutrality on both sides are dumbed down and print ads aren’t much better. He complains that you have to go to web pages to find out details. Horrors. Actually, Birnbaum points out a very good reason for net neutrality. Yes, television ads are always dumbed down, because they’re brief and have to be tailored for the lowest common denominator, and have to be carried by media which are mostly already owned by only a few big corporations, who can choose what to broadcast. Yes, print ads may be somewhat better, but are still limited in size and have to be carried by print media which are mostly already owned by only a few big corporations, who can choose what to print. The Internet alone provides a medium for distribution of information as detailed as necessary, in multiple formats for different audiences, and, with net neutrality, still not yet under the control of any particular group of companies.

One result of Birnbaum’s argument, if you buy it, is to think that there are two equal sides to this debate. Actually, there are the big U.S. incumbent telephone companies, who are the big ISPs stateside now, and pretty much everybody else. Why it would benefit everybody else to grant oligarchic power over content to a small group of telecommunications providers is not clear to me.

Historically speaking, it seems to me that what has permitted the Internet to grow as fast and as large as it has and to provide such varied content to so many users is exactly its decentralization and distribution, one of the main aspects of which is net neutrality. So it seems to me that the burden of proof for changing net neutrality should be on the small group of U.S. incumbent providers that want to do so. Unfortunately, they’ve already changed the previous U.S. regulations that enforced it, and now they’re opposing changing it back. It’s time for all those concerned to speak up.

-jsq