What is this Net Neutrality thing?

Basically, greed runs rampant and this is nothing more than a profit grab by the large ISP’s. Let’s roll this back a bit…. In the early 90’s, Internet access was delivered to the end-user by small, home-grown ISP’s via dial-up modem. Before that, BBS users consumed vast amounts of hours on their Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).

Even then, the Telco’s were bitching about how a small percentage of users were consuming a large percentage of services…yet all paid the same roughly the same for their POTS. In other words, the grandmother down the street who makes 2-3 calls a week to her daughter across town, pays the same “rate” for local dial-tone access as I did. And, I was on my phone probably 18-20 hours a day, solid, accessing other BBS’s and connecting to the Internet/BITNET.

Hey, wait a second here. That seems totally unfair! Grandma should pay less.. and thus “Local Measured Service” was being waved around. Well, let’s think about this a bit deeper…

Telephone companies are required to provide service in remote areas, that are very expensive to connect and maintain. Yet, those people pay roughly the same tariffed rate as those in the city, where it can be much cheaper to connect and maintain. If the telco’s were not regulated in this manner, and allowed to charge based directly on cost to connect an area into their switch/network, these remote areas couldn’t afford to have telephone service or internet access.

In other words, while it may seem unfair in the grandma analogy, it is just how it should work from a 30,000ft regulatory view. Raise your hand, if you believe telco’s provide high-speed communications to remote locations, because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy? Exactly…

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the large ISP’s are wanting to do this..it would allow them to increase their profits with no additional infrastructure investment. However, it certainly isn’t right, and it certainly is not good for the consumer.

Equal access is a term that is often tossed around in the Telco world, and roughly applies in the Net Neutrality debate. Without equal access to all content providers, ISP’s will be able to “bundle” their own offerings, and split the internet into large AOL-ish fiefdom’s…with throttled bottlenecks between each other. No more high speed sharing between users connected through disparate ISP’s. Want to use iTunes to purchase your music and video? Sorry, Comcast has an exclusive agreement with Napster…and Comcast is the ONLY option on your block for cable modems. You are shit out of luck.

For years, ISP’s have hidden behind the common carrier term when it comes to delivering content… now it is time for them to behave like one, even though it isn’t in their favor. ISP/Telco’s shouldn’t be allowed to change the rules now that the rules they have used to their benefit in the past, are now throttling their profits.

Throughly confused? Read more on the Net Neutrality debate by Tim Berners-Lee on ars technica.

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