The Net Neutrality Debate

It's been a while since I've posted. I have been working hard on my senior design project and my honors thesis, and I will have lots of new Perl tidbits as well as a few Java code pieces (mainly having to do with XML-RPC or eXtensible Markup Language - Remote Procedure Call) to blog about here pretty soon. In light of the Thursday (April 17) on-campus debate that Stanford held the other day, to which the ISPs failed to even show up, I wanted to write a bit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good insite into why programmers and application developers like Net Neutrality. Stanford's Larry Downes has some good points from the opponents of Net Neutrality that make a lot of sense. In particular, he doesn't like the idea of government regulation in the private sector (particularly on a technical topic that few politicians can comprehend) that could lead to negative consequences and the law being interpreted in ways not imagined when it is put in place. He even makes what I think is probably a generally true assesment:

Privacy concerns aside, my guess is that many people who are in favor of net neutrality also think of themselves generally as libertarians, at least when it comes to the idea of government entities micromanaging information technology and its applications, especially the Internet

He also doesn't feel that the FCC has the capacity to regulate the ISPs, which is probably true.

I have drafted up an 8-page proposal on Internet Neutrality that I will post on here in some way when I have completed it. I fall into the libertarian category that Downes refers to, and I don't want to have legislation that will prevent the ISPs from operating their business effectively; however, we do need to keep them honest. I believe that a very limited form of government interference is necessary to keep the Internet functioning as consumers have come to expect it. This legislation would not have to in any way regulate the ISPs into an inflexible business model, nor would it require the FCC to monitor the ISPs. It would, however require that we enact law that legally defines the term "Internet access" as access to a 100% neutral network that will indiscriminately route information from and to any host that is also connected to the Internet. This along with some other non-government actions such as getting the word out on the benefits of a neutral Internet will be sufficient to allow market forces to shoot down a non-neutral Net. ISPs may freely offer whatever type of network they wish and discriminate all they wish; they simply can't call access to those networks "Internet access". If consumers know that they aren't on a free and open network, and they do have access to another truely free network, they would surely choose the open network. This may also require further miniciple goverment action to use tax dollars to build up Internet infrastructure so that consumers will have a choice of a free network when only 1 or 2 disciminatory ISPs offer service in their area, but once the infrastructure is in place, it could even be sold to private ISPs for management in the agreement that it remain a neutral network.